The notions
of philosophy belong to the Überlebenswelt. Some of them are formalizations of Lebenswelt
words and narratives, but soon enough they become technical objects for the art
of thinking, obscuring them for their everyday use though clearing their
semantic field by fixing and simplifying their references. The more basic the
notions taken from the Lebenswelt, the more difficult the philosophical
dealings with them, for we commonly mistake what seems obvious for what is
simple and needs less thought. When those notions are exomorphisms, limits for
our thinking beyond which we cannot even conceive, then we can barely say
anything about them. Such is the case of presence,
which leads us to the notions of being at
hand, being here (praes-ens) and
related ones. In some cases, the philological investigation leads to further
problems. In its use and custom, presence
functions in most European languages as some sort of epiphany of power
emanating from a person, a connotation that extends its roots back to Cicero
and Caesar when they spoke of praesentia
animi, for the concept of presence relates also to the impersonation and
dramatic performance of the Shaman that brings back the ancestors from the
realm of the first instituted ritual actions, and with such action presents
what is felt as numinous, whether incarnated in a person, a place, a ritual or
a myth. In Greek, the equivalent word is parousia,
as being there, or being next to, or as the substance there, a set of deeply
rooted ontological meanings which, within the Christian myth, culminates in the
eschatological sense of the second coming of Christ.
How could
we think about the term presentation
without carrying such heavy metaphysical luggage? Well, the symbolic
functioning of our thinking implies that some metaphysics is unavoidably
produced when we talk about something which is not at hand though still it is brought
to the scene by the communicative act of referring or mapping. Beisdes, ontologies
need exomorphisms which cannot be proven and have to be taken at face value,
points of departure, termini in the
liminal ground of existence. If we want to talk about presence and presentation
we need to talk about life and the problem of existence, where things get
entangled and contradictory, bloody and messy, charged with all sorts of
foundational myths and group identities, things that people kill for in burst of
primitive and basic emotional protocols. Let me discuss it here only on
epistemological grounds, establishing explicit ontological assumptions.
Since Kant’s
philosophy, the traditional denomination for presentation and representation
has been Vorstellung which remits to
notions such as what is placed in front
or outside of, but also idea, picture, and so forth. In Kant’s First Kritik, a Vorstellung or representatio
is an undefined term, an exomorphism of his epistemological system. Representationes are the objects which
are synthesized in the unity of apperception, they are the undefined genus that
refers to an elementary whatness of data reception from experience and the
minimum shape that it takes. In successive determinations, the representatio becomes perceptio when consciousness is also at
work, sensatio when the perception is
taken dynamically, as a change in the subject, and then cognitio, when the perception is of an object. If the cognition is
immediately related to the object and is singular, Kant calls it an intuitus, but when the cognition is
mediated by a mark common to several things he calls it a conceptus. Finally, conceptus
are either empirical or pure (if related to the inner workings of the
understanding); these pure concepts are called notiones, and when a conceptus
is made up of notiones which go
beyond experience it is called an idea (Kritik
der reinen Vernunft. A320). This categorization of the cognition process
from the grounds of a rational psychology works well as terminological definitions
though gives little knowledge of how it works or the conditions of possibility
for such system. They define a set of interconnected epistemological actions
that remain unknown inasmuch representations are unknown data. Besides, the
very problematic concept of consciousness is at work in order to understand the
second link of the epistemological chain of terms, for perception is defined as
a representatio accompanied by consciousness, something that together with the
ambiguity of the term consciousness
implies a curious nonsense: the noise of our alarm clock is not perceived, for
we are not awake when we start perceiving it, and consciousness (whatever the
meaning that we ascribe to the concept) has to be some sort of waking mental
activity. May be, in Kantian terms, we should say that perception is the
condition for consciousness, and that what is perceived, representations, could
be subsumed under the concept of manifold, or better, apeiron, a minimum
building block or starting concept. The example is rather crude but shows that
even in such imprecise terms we find difficulties to make sense out of this
terminology. Kant’s schema functions better once we find ourselves outside the
troubled waters of consciousness and talk about intuitus, for with such concept we stand in the common grounds of
Lebenswelt terminology and not on the liminal forest of our basic acquaintance
with the inputs received from the world. An intuition is a function of our cognition
which relates immediately such cognition to an object,[1]
or in other terms, a mapping of the black box of cognition (which implies,
consciousness and subject) to the world.
In a sense,
the constructive tools of Kant’ schema do not differ much from those of
Leibniz, despite the obvious fact that their ontologies contain different objects,
even contradictory among them in relation to their postulations, especially in respect
to the nature of the subject and the world (space-time and matter), but they
both proceed by the mere construction of no-contradictory systems whose
relations are obtained by reflection with no sustain at all in an
Überlebenswelt construction of physiology and physics that would be of great
help in order to endomorphize representationes.
Sometimes representatio has been equated with Darstellung, though this second term
includes also (and mainly) artistic representations and mimesis. In fact, such
mimetic content of the term applies also to the old Latin and Greek
counterparts. The German terms, however, lost the meaning of the prefix re- in their expression, the notion of a
repetition in the presentation, the return of what is being presented, so I
will keep the original Latin form, for such repetition outlines the importance
of memory in the process of representing.
From an
epistemological point of view the problem involved in our notion of
representation is the determination in space-time of subject and object, and
how is that made possible, together with a narrative of the systems involved in
the process. This requires some ontological assumptions. In relation to how is
possible the double determination of object and subject, I simply make it
follow from the fact that I can distinguish between objects and me, between I
and not-I, and I assume that such distinction is common to all life since biology’s
descriptions of cell’s membranes shows an elemental filtering out process which
produces the identity of the system; we can call it membrane principle. Thus, if I can establish differences in
relation to myself and the world, it is obviously possible to make them, and
such distinctions are basic processes which all life must undergo in order to
maintain the set of actions that constitute it. In relation to the narrative
which describes the process of making
differences, I choose the system (set with relations) established by the
ontology of evolutionism, and the neuroscientific epistemology of the
equivalent theories of the dynamic core (Tononi and Ederlman; 1998), the global
workspace (Baars; 1989; Dehaene, Kerszberg and Changeaux; 1998), supervisory
attentional system. (Shallice; 1998), the central executive theory (Baddeley;
1986), anterior attention system (Posner and Dehaene 1994). I use these
theories in critical sense, complementing them with the tools of epistemology
and anthropological philosophy narratives. By doing this we transform the old
exomorphisms of presence and representation, which did not provide any further
satisfactory explanations for the cognitive process, into endomorphic
physiological processes.
