Date: Wed, 16 Apr 2003 16:35:02 +1100
From: hbone <hbone-AT-optonline.net>
Subject: Re: the fragility of reality


Steve,
Steve,

We must have different understandings of culture and experience.


Hugh

>are you suggesting that any human experience, excepting the earliest days
of  a human >infant - can be understood as being unmediated by human culture
?

No.   Culture (for me) includes care of the infant, essential to survival.

>And if not then what is the profound difference between the experience of
reading a text >by M.Duras and drinking a glass of water. Both are profound
cultural experiences and >why is one more objectionable to you than the
other ?

Drinking a glass of water is a first-person experience.  Reading a text is a
first person experience.  If Duras describes drinking a glass of water or
anthing else you had never drunk, your knowledge of that act would be only
what her words conveyed; an abstraction, but not objectionable.  It is
culturally profound for you, might not be culturally profound for me.

Drinking a glass of water is profound in the sense that water is essential
to life, life is essential to culture.  Neither is objectionable.

regards,
Hugh



regards
steve



hbone wrote:

Eric/All,

I'll answer your other messages later, but here's an almost "im-mediate"
response.

You wrote,


I am really somewhat incredulous of Hugh's claims that experience gives us
a direct unmediated apprehension of reality.


 As one who studies Freud, I'm sure you know how greatly persons differ in
their senses, feelings and thoughts.  True, we can see for the blind, hear
for the deaf, convey information that is not directly experienced.  With
those handicaps, those persons  cannot know the reality of hearing and
seeing, but get a second-party, mediated, version of events they cannot
witness.

As individuals, we have different acuity of perception via  each of our five
senses.  Part of the difference is physical, part is learned.  Wine tasters
and artists are more sensitive to flavors and colors than most people.
Years of experience increase their proficiency.

Each organism (to some degree) perceives the same object differently
because of personal history, especially we old and decrepit campers. -  You
are what you do and you are your encoded memories.  You are your personal
history. That's my opinion, and you have yours.

For me, this means plural realities.  The fragility and multiplicity of
reality is partly due to a potentially changing object, but also to the
history of the one who perceives it.

You are incredulous of first-person un-mediated apprehension of reality.   I
am incredulous of your (seeming) preference for realities mediated by
others.

Hugh