The Validity of Perception
Last week, someone I knew on Facebook posted a Calvin & Hobbes
cartoon.
It was one I had seen before-
did I mention I was a big Calvin & Hobbes fan?- and shared with my academic
friends, sort of as a light-hearted in-joke- a nostalgic reminder of our
experiences as clueless students trying to hand in assignments within looming
deadlines. As one classmate very memorably said on encountering a discomfiting
question- “What’s the point of studying literature for all these years if you
can’t use the language to fib and improvise?” Strangely enough, I had never
seen this joke as a specifically literary one, but found its humour revolving
around the fact that Calvin didn’t actually know anything substantial to say about
the subject. As a teacher one knows that the less a student has studied, the
more likely she is to “inflate weak ideas, obscure pure reasoning” and write
longer and more convoluted sentences. However, my Facebook friend graced this
little strip with a caption, and it was:
“What I feel literature and maybe all of humanities is basically.”
That was it. All of literature and all of humanities were built on
weak ideas inflated to obscure poor reasoning that may be useful just like
prayer and voodoo was useful (this from the comment section) but not
necessarily valid, because “the premise of humanities is the antithesis of
scientific principles of objectivity and falsifiability.”
I don’t want to go into defending all of humanities, nor do I need to.
Most of us know that the charge of a lack of objectivity and falsifiability is
not even true in most cases, especially in the social sciences. Let us talk
instead of the mode that is supposedly the antithesis of the objective
scientific principle- which I presume is the human faculty of imagination.
Now I know that it is impossible according to the principles of
biology and physics for a man to fly by attaching wings made of bird feathers
to his shoulders using wax. But if Icarus didn’t fall from the sky, where would
the Wright Brothers be? Humans have an innate desire to fly, to transcend the
limitations of their physical bodies. I do not have objective, quantifiable
data to substantiate this claim, which I suppose makes it an unscientific, weak
idea. And I am aware that there is a thin line between claiming that there are
multiple modes of perceiving the world to those that state that evolution is
merely a theory. My aim is not to dismiss the science. I am definitely not a
creationist. What I do believe is that our creation stories offer us certain
modes of understanding the world, or of the people who told those stories. Like
the Discworld Death, I find myself hovering between the rising ape of Darwin
and the falling angel of the Bible and I am struck by the incomprehensible
beauty of creation from Chaos, to imagine that some part of me might have
always been and will always be existing in the universe, through Time and
beyond it- “Whether Chaos brought life and substance out of nothing or whether
Chaos yawned life up or dreamed it up, or conjured it up in some other way I
don’t know. I wasn’t there. Nor were you. And yet in a way we were, because all
the bits that make us were there. It is enough to say that the Greeks thought
that it was Chaos who, with a massive heave, or a great shrug, or hiccup, vomit
or cough, began the long chain of creation that has ended with pelicans and
penicillin and toadstools and toads, sea-lions, seals, lions, human beings and
daffodils and murder and art and love and confusion and death and madness and
biscuits.” (Stephen Fry, Mythos: A Retelling of the Myths of Ancient Greece).
It is beautiful to see sunlight breaking into VIBGYOR through water
and rain-washed clouds, but if you ask me, it would be a sad world if we
couldn’t imagine a path to Asgard through the rainbow, or see a Mary Poppins
cycling down from the sky. A dead world, even, for what is science but the
physical manifestations of our dreams and stories? If we didn’t dream, we would
stop living. Is it happening inside your head? Perhaps. Is it not true? Why the
hell not? (Sorry, Dumbledore) And how could something happen outside your head
if it didn’t happen inside it first? After all, as Dr. Radhakrishnan said in a
rather heavily-worded essay, it takes quite a leap of imagination to see an
apple falling from the tree on the evidently flat surface of an average planet
to visualizing cosmic spheres each exerting its own force of attraction in the
universe. Other people saw apples fall from trees too, Newton just saw it
differently.
Dermot Moran, in an article
on Merleau-Ponty writes-
“In his wonderful “Eye and
Mind”, Merleau-Ponty asks what the world looks like for whose eyes are lateral
and don’t unite to give a single sense of vision. What would the world look
like if humans had eyes on either side of their heads – like birds? … I
remember travelling on the train from Aberdeen and looking out at green hills
on one side and water on the other. ... We see differently when we try to see
what others see.”[1]
In coming to terms with a personal depression over the past year, I have increasingly
come to see that human beings need more than a practical existence,
Let me know what you think of this in the comments. And you can read more of my poems and listen to my music on these handles:
Instagram :RuchiraRambles
Facebook: Ruchira's Rambling
YouTube: Ruchira Mandal
Twitter: RucchiraM
[1] From The Philosopher’s
Magazine, an article on Merleau-Ponty by Dermot Moran (h/t However
Fallible)
[2] Terry Pratchett, The Hogfather,
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