Perception I: Coming Into Being By Way of Others Coming Into View

What defines an existence as an „animal being‟ and „alive‟, in Aristotle‟s view, is determined by whether or not it has the capacity to perceive, and in the human case, the capacity to think (11170a17-20). Since the capacity of perception is thusly attached to primary human being, it follows that the first stages of enabling this capacity is an essential stage of development. My intuition is that, in the NE, there is also a central social context to perception-enabled

capacities.

29 We shall see in section 4.1.4 that friends are also lovable as enablers of virtuous activity.

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While perception is defining of animal life, it is difficult for us to see how it can be so defining for Hannah in her first stage of life. She is being taken care of and has little need of perceptive capacities in order to function by way of taking in nourishment and growing. While she does have working perceptive capacities that affect her and allow her surroundings to understand how she is affected, she has not yet developed the cognitive link between perception and thought. Yet there is still something happening with Hannah‟s senses that classifies as perceiving. Instead, perception in infancy seems more pertinent to her social context than to her natural surroundings. One example is Hannah‟s growing attachment to her parents.

It is not difficult to understand how perception can be crucial in early social development. For instance, it is said that infants are nearsighted until they are several weeks old, and though they see little they are capable of seeing the distance to someone‟s face when being held. In addition, empirical studies have also shown that infants quickly learn to recognise specific details of the face of the mother. In which sense could

something like this be classified as perception under Aristotle‟s theory? The perceiving faculty that stands above all other senses, in Aristotle‟s view, is the faculty of sight (1171b70). However, at an infant stage we would only be capable of taking in a close object‟s “accidental form” and not its “intelligible form” (DA II4416b20-23) by way of sight, since we do not as of yet have the cognitive capabilities to attach an understanding of the objects form to the perceived object. So an infant‟s taking in someone‟s “accidental form”, would be seeing someone‟s facial features but not understanding that they make up a semantic object or person, and can be likened to „discerning‟ (chrinein, though chrinein is also often understood as „judging‟, but not in the present case). The child does not yet make a cognitive connection between what she sees and what she sees as an object. Yet, while an infant will only recognise the features of a parent incidentally, it still gains familiarity with the parent in the sense of preferring the closeness of a recognised parent over an unfamiliar person. We also say that the child develops attachment by way of recognition through several senses. Though we cannot say that the infant has an intelligible recognition of the person, and cannot describe a clear cut transition showing when and how a child is capable of taking in a parents „intelligible form‟, we can say that the infant is developing a faculty of recognition. Most important, in the present case, is that perception facilitated by the closeness necessary for early nurturing is giving the infant an extremely focussed, close and detailed experience of the parent or anyone whom is caring for it, necessitated by the

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nurturing of the child. „Discerning‟ then, in this case, has as its function an attachment, and has literally closeness between parent and offspring as its enabling variable, because of the child‟s needs for nurturing.

Compared to the parent, whose bond to the child is “instant” (1161b25) and on sight, a parent‟s coming into view is for the child gradual. And while the mother (from whom the child has come) „knows the child‟ (1159a28-30), the child does not, or cannot, know the mother in the same sense. Yet the parent becomes intelligible to the child gradually and defines the child‟s becoming a perceiver in her own right, a perceiver who can with time induce another‟s intelligible form, and know who someone is, even to the degree of a parent to a child. Aristotle marks a clear transition in the infant stage, however, where the child becomes capable of sensing her surroundings affectively and through emotion: The child can feel affection for parent after a time when s/he has gained

comprehension and/or the capacity to perceive (1161b26). This passage raises some doubts about when and at which stage an infant becomes capable of sensing the other with her full arsenal of sensing faculties, including her capacity to comprehend. It appears, though, that Aristotle has in mind a stage when perception and comprehension conflux. At this time there emerges an emotional bond of affection, perhaps love, in the child towards the parent.

From Aristotle‟s passages concerning sight and perception in the NE, it seems plausible that he relies on theory developed in other works. Let me then present a theory from De Anima that is at first glance quite out of context, as it concerns animal perception in general, and sensory organs in particular, but can explain a great deal about perception of the other from the comments above. Perception is viewed by Aristotle as a type of „meeting of forms‟, i.e. the sum of the material, formal and final causes of the object meeting the form of the subject, via sensation as the mean. In De Anima he then writes,

“As we have said, what has the power of sensation is potentially like what the perceived object is actually; that is, while at the beginning of the process of its being acted upon the two interacting factors are dissimilar, at the end the one acted upon is assimilated to the other as identical in quality with it (DAII.5 418a4-6).

This somewhat cryptic passage explains a process describing the perceiver (or more correctly her perceiving organs) before „meeting‟ and taking in an object or form, as having a capacity to be potentially similar to what the object is qualitatively. So what does it mean to be similar? Though this concept obviously deserves to be discussed in depth, we can say in brief

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that likeness here is defined metaphysically as being capable of falling under the same category of quality³⁰, quality in turn pertaining to what the object is in actuality in relation to opposing pairs of actuality, like whether something is hot or cold, light or heavy, soft or hard, shaped this way or the other, pertaining to the distinctions the senses can let us make out. So our sensory organs can pick up change by being able to juxtapose an opposing quality, rendering the quality in the object. We can also understand „likeness‟ in a commonsensical way as one object becoming likened to the other object in virtue of shared „incidental forms‟

under its „intelligible form‟. The potent and somewhat surprising notion Aristotle here puts forward is: that through perception, the perceiver has in her the capability to mirror, by way of opposed affective capacities, the activity of the object, the activity of the object being what the object does by way of initiating qualitative change, and by extension, sensing the objects form as a cause of change (what it truly is), thus accessing the objects form indirectly.

This way of looking at sense perception, not as a mirror of activity but as an apparatus undergoing simultaneous change caused by the observed activities, explains at the same time why it is that a perceiver will be dependent on continuous observation of the objects‟ activities, and a memory of said activity, to gain enough examples to discern or judge the objects form. When we then take another human being to be this type of

perceived object, it becomes clearer why it takes such a long time and activity to „get‟ the other‟s form. It then becomes even more surprising and unique that, under Aristotle‟s understanding, we can truly have access to someone else‟s form (especially said mothers instant access in 1161b25, 1159a28-30) as what this person truly is, by way of what the person can do capacitatively, does dispositionally and is intelligibly.

What is perhaps most significant, however, under this interpretation of the above passage, is a claim that by perceiving, the subject and object become more similar to each other. Dissimilar forms take each other in by a sort of „assimilation‟, while in the next step of the process of perceiving they become similar in the first instance qualitatively, by the activity of the perceived other, affecting the subject in real time qua their initial qualitative differences, and secondly, by way of the subject sensing the juxtapositions of change from dissimilarity to likeness. It is also because of initial qualitative dissimilarity that the other is initially noticeable to the subject, the argument being that if the senses were in the same state as the sense-object then there would be no differentiation to be sensed.

30 See the beginning of 2.2; a quality can contribute or to, or diminish, the souls functioning as it should.

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I have stated that a clear motivation to perceive one‟s friend is pleasure. Pleasure is clearly the source of affection between lovers as stated in 1171b30. More interestingly in the present case, however, is that pleasure is also derived from similarity (1156b18). When we observe each other, and affectively derive each other‟s „form‟, we are in fact in the process of becoming more similar, and thereby deriving pleasure from the encounter.

Perception of the other thusly becomes both a means and an activity in its own right, necessitating both closeness and activity in order to „know‟ the other, but when in active mode leads to likeness between subject and object along with pleasure in the process.

4.1.4 Perception II: Self-Perception, Active Perception and the Desire to Be a True