Reply to comment

I got excited last class when Paul demonstrated the ability of the brain to synthesize contradictory input by having us focus on on object with only one eye, then watch it shift when we used the other eye... it's a phenomenon/effect called parallax that gets taken up as an extended metaphor by Slavoj Žižek in his book, The Parallax View (which you should absolutely check out if you like your philosophy peppered with references to Tom Waits songs, Henry James novels, and movies like Alien... way more fun than Kant).  Žižek is interested in reconciling different philosophical/critical theory projects that seemingly have nothing to do with one another, but one conclusion he comes to that I think is applicable here is that "truth" isn't in this or that philosopher's description of the way the world works.  We have so many different, often contradictory, pictures of the universe's organization presented to us in philosophy, in artistic (re)presentations, and as we saw last class, in the basic sensory input our organism is receiving all the time.  With so much diversity, how can we say a single picture is "complete" or accurate? 

In Rachel Wilson's article about mouse olfactory bulbs, she's talking about the benefits of diversity among input-processing equipment on a biological level, but warns that results in vivo might be different from those demonstrated in vitro.  I think if we take seriously what we've learned in this class about life outside of the test tube, we have to think that these pro-difference findings will be even more valuable applied to the "real" world.  Because accurately summarizing the plot of a film isn't analogous to being able to summarize/master/represent in consciousness our actual life-world.  It's too big, too complex, and also ever-shifting because it is itself a construction of the brain.  Attempts to master or get the whole/correct picture will always prove futile.  What we want now is agility.  This is where Žižek says truth is, not in one philosophical system or the other, not in the image produced by the input coming from one eye or another, but in the movement between the two.  So truth isn't a content thing at all... not even an inaccessible noumenal content thing.  Truth isn't a representable image but that which cannot be contained in consciousness.  Because it can't be contained.  It's always moving.  It's just that jump back and forth, or from one thing to the next.  Parallax doesn't refer to the synthesized image but to the the effect of the displacement... which is something we actually can have "direct contact" with.