Non-Conceptual Content Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

In this paper, I will tackle a question that has been absent in the literature, namely, what is Heidegger’s conception of color-perception. Heidegger himself, who discusses at length other kinds of experiences, is silent about the topic. But why does Heidegger pay so little attention to colors, which are, for Husserl, for instance, a prime case for phenomenological analysis? A simple answer would be that colors, as such, become phenomenologically relevant only within an ontology of atomistic property-bearing entities (or as Heidegger calls it, of Vorhandenheit), an ontology such as Husserl’s, which is one of the favorite targets of Heidegger’s criticisms.
Nevertheless, I think this approach to the problem is wrongheaded for two reasons:
First, even if we start from the phenomenological fact that we cannot experience colors as separated and independent from colored objects and that we cannot experience objects outside a holistic temporally extended net of other objects, that does not allow us to eo ipso put aside questions regarding how we are to think about colors. Adams (2016, p. xviii) distinguishes between first-order and second-order claims about colors. While the former are claims about objects and colors as properties (e.g. ‘This brick is orange’), the latter are “claims about the nature of color properties themselves” (Ibid). Though it seems we are able to produce first-order claims without acknowledging second-order ones, it is far from obvious that the questions arising from the latter are philosophically unproblematic. Thus, adequately examining Heidegger’s take on colors requires that we consider whether Heidegger might be said to engage with these second-order color questions. I aim to show that Heidegger manages to shed light on the debate concerning second-order questions even though he does not explicitly address such problems.
Second, if what I just said opens a path to inquire into Heidegger’s contribution to the debate about colors, I also argue that this inquiry into Heidegger’s take on colors may prove fruitful for understanding his approach to experience, in general, and perception, in particular. In order to do so we need to challenge the assumption made by Dreyfus, Wrathall, and others that I will call the either-theory-or-praxis assumption. According to it, there are (at least) two heterogeneous ways of experiencing something: we can experience it as a tool, a piece of equipment, a meaningful part of our practical coping or we can experience it as an isolated, atomic, independent item from a theoretical perspective. There are many textual grounds to challenge such conclusion. I will not engage with the question of how to read Heidegger on these matters, but rather assume that once we abandon the either-theory-or-praxis assumption we can gain a new insight on the problem of color. The idea is this: Heidegger’s description of experience does not privilege some phenomena (say, tools or meanings) vis-à-vis others (things, colors and the like), but rather a way of understanding experience in general (as organized in terms of a whole of meaningful relations where each single thing is defined by its normative import for the whole, i.e. a relational view) vis-à-vis a way of understanding it in terms of atomic items and stratified properties. I will call this conception of experience a normative-conceptual one (Golob, 2014).
But since the world is obviously populated by colors, numbers and atoms, just as much as it is by tools, pieces of art and people, in order to be successful such a conception must be able to accommodate things such as colors, in particular, and perceptual experiences, in general. Now the question is what is to be said about colors from a normative-conceptual approach to experience such as Heidegger’s. Are colors a counterexample to Heidegger’s normative-conceptualism or, to the contrary, can colors be accounted for in normative-conceptualist terms? This is the question I would like to tackle in this paper.
My strategy will be to engage with the supposed challenges that color perception poses to conceptualism in general. So-called arguments from the fine-grainedness of perception (Speaks, 2005) find in colors a prime example of non-conceptual content. In particular, I would like to analyze some examples presented by Sean Kelly designed to show that color perception is a very good candidate for denying conceptualism, i.e the thesis that contents of experience involve a form of articulation that is at least similar to the one expressed in judgment. I will claim, on the contrary, following a Heideggerian strategy, that color perception is an excellent candidate for showing in what sense conceptualism is true, precisely by analyzing Kelly’s examples of color sorting.