The Attack on the Senses from their Limitation
Various philosophers, have throughout the course of history attacked the senses on the grounds that they are limited, concluding that they are therefore invalid. This, of course, ignores that:
- the senses are valid;
- the senses don't distort, and;
- if the senses are invalid then so is knowledge, among other things.
What these theorists miss most importantly is that everything that exists is limited, what they seek is non-real sensory capabilities---supernatural capabilities for man.
Every existent is bound by the laws of identity and causality. This applies not only to the physical world, but also to consciousness. Consciousness—any consciousness, of any species—is what it is. It is limited, finite, lawful. It is a faculty with a nature, which includes specific instrumentalities that enable it to achieve awareness. It is a something that has to grasp its objects somehow.[1]
The assertion that consciousness (or anything else) is limited in it's capacities is just another way of saying that it is what it is---that it has specific properties as against possessing whatever random, contradictory, aspects. All of the standard, kitchen cabinet, attacks on the senses levied in the history of philosophy start in some way with the premise that an "ideal" consciousness would not be limited, that it would be able to grasp primaries directly, and that because consciousness is limited--because it has identity--it is therefore invalid:
"A certain object looks red or sounds loud or feels solid, but that is partly because of the nature of human eyes, ears, or touch. Therefore, we are cut off from the external world. We do not perceive reality as it really is, but only reality as it appears to man;" [...]
"Certain abstract conclusions are incontestable to us, but that is partly because of the nature of the human mind. If we had a different sort of mind, with a different sort of conceptual apparatus, our idea of truth and reality would be different. Human knowledge, therefore, is only human; it is subjective; it does not apply to things in themselves." [...]
"Even the most meticulous proof depends on our sense of what is logical, which must depend in part on the kind of mental constitution we have. The real truth on any question is, therefore, unknowable. To know it, we would have to contact reality directly, without relying on our own logical makeup. We would have to jump outside of our own nature, which is impossible."[2]
We are given a false-dichotomy: either you accept the premise that the ideal consciousness lacks identity, notice that our consciousness does not, and therefore conclude that our consciousness is invalid (such as Kant) or you accept the same premise that the ideal consciousness lacks identity, and conclude that our own consciousness must be a characterless "mirror," as do the naïve realists---it is the Objectivists who recognise this as a package deal and drop the poison pill.
The following is a list of some influential instances of the fallacy of attacking the senses from being limited:
- The Attack on the Senses by Being Effects
- The Attack on the Senses by Eddington's Two Tables
- The Kantian Attack on Cognition
We can know the content of reality "pure," apart from man's perceptual form; but we can do so only by abstracting away man's perceptual form---only by starting from sensory data, then performing a complex scientific process. To demand that the senses give us such "pure" content is to rewrite the function of the senses and the mind. It is to demand a blatant contradiction: a sensory image bearing no marks of its sensory character---or a percept of that which, by its nature, is the object only of a concept.[3]