When you’re standing in front of an artwork or architecture observing and experiencing it, you are perceiving and receiving information about your surroundings in that very moment. You are likely more focused on the artwork in front of you, if there aren’t too many other physical distractions in the rooms. Distractions can be other people or other objects in the room.
Merleau-Ponty understood that one’s own body (le corps propre) is not only a thing, a potential object of study for science, but is also a permanent condition of experience, a constituent of the perceptual openness to the world. Continuously we experience and are provided information through our bodies, our senses are always perceiving, continuously collecting information.
He underlines that there is an inherence of consciousness and of the body of which the analysis of perception should take account. The primacy of perception signifies a primacy of experience, so to speak, insofar as perception becomes an active and constitutive dimension.
When observing an artwork, we interact with it. Our senses perceive and receive information, the entirety of our body is involved in the experience. Even if you believe not to be interacting with or to be affected by the artwork, your experience is embodied. How come some people don’t seem to think or believe that some artworks aren’t affecting them? Everyone of us have presuppositions, a way of filtering our world and surroundings, we all have our own unique connective tissue through which we relate and experience our world and surroundings.
Can we unlearn to perceive our surroundings through our learned filtering mechanisms? How deeply rooted are these learned patterns and beliefs that influence and determine how we often perceive, experience, filter and organise our world consciously?
We should seek to explore and understand our own learned presuppositions, beliefs and patterns. Some presuppositions are shared among other individuals, some are unique to you.
A way to get started is diving into unconscious bias and how they affect your own decision making and emotional response to your surroundings. To uncover presuppositions that are unique to you, you are required to examine and investigate yourself. You have to question yourself and reflect on what information you tend to cling onto after you’ve interacted with your surroundings and other people.
The presuppositions are part of what makes you the person you are, for better and for worse. They lure unconsciously beneath the surface and influence how you understand and interpret a given situation, that you’re encountering.
Thinking about the future
A modern, sophisticated civilisation and society have created calendars and clocks according to astronomical phenomena, it helps us navigate and coordinate with each other. As human beings, the urge to structure and organise our time, originates from a certain ability, compared to other mammals. We have the ability to contemplate our future. In our society we even have a shared contemplation of the future, short term and long term. Short term I can call and make a restaurant reservation for the weekend and the person on the receiving end of my call will note it down and expect me to appear for the reservation. Long term it becomes a little more interesting. What will happen, what do we expect of the future?
Do you see climate change or the decline in the global population as being things to consider solving now? What is your truth and are there any truths that are truly shared among us?
Kaputte 