Perception, Conception And Beauty

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty, —that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

John Keats

It was raining so lightly late this afternoon that you could count the drops as they fell on your skin. Tiny beginnings may announce huge things to come however.

It’s getting harder and harder to see and feel beauty of northern California during months of smudgy skies from wildfires erupting every year now, driven by the climate crisis. So the rains, though not a “bomb cyclone,” are welcome.

The bike loop around the bygone habitat of pheasant, long-eared rabbits, kite falcons, coyote and rattlesnakes, is now a hideous “development,” with architecture ranging from a huge city hall monstrosity that looks like it was designed by three competing architects, to hundreds of retro-tech box apartments, to dreary sprawls of cheap office buildings. What becomes of “beauty is truth” when the beauty of the earth is destroyed?

A prominent pundit in America recently gave me pause when he wrote: “As our old friend Kant argued, perceptions without conceptions are blind.”

I’ve talked with many philosophers, and I haven’t met one yet who fully understands what Kant meant by much of what he wrote. So it’s a double conceit for our ubiquitous New York Times columnist to assume Kantian authority in pronouncing, “perceptions without conceptions are blind.”

Double because he gave only half of the Kant quote. The full quote is: “Perception without conception is blind; conception without perception is empty.”

What does that mean? I think Kant meant that we cannot perceive what we haven’t first conceived, and that our conceptions must be renewed by perception. If so, the first clause is false; and the second is half-true.

In actuality, perception not only has primacy over conception, but conception obstructs perception. Our conceptions are inevitably formed and informed by knowledge and experience, which means that they are always pre-conceptions where the present moment is concerned.

Therefore perception determined by conception is blind.

So despite the glib assertion by the commentator, looking at people and things through the lens of our prior conceptions prevents direct perception, since our conceptions always color the present moment. Or rather, the accumulation of conceptions reduces the present moment to an increasingly dull, flat gray.

The direct, unmediated perception of what is, is the doorway to vibrancy and truth, which is always in the present. Therefore in a world gone mad with fragmented perceptions from contradictory perceptions (many completely divorced from facts), direct perception without conception isn’t just a philosophical fine point, but an emotional, spiritual and political imperative.

As we get older the perception of beauty becomes more difficult because memories and experiences fill the mind, leaving less and less space for seeing with innocence, as the child sees. It requires diligence to retain a purity of perception, though the very notion of purity is ridiculed by ruling elites.

Jesus’ injunction, “unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven,” has been dismissed and derisively dismissed as “immaculate perception.”

Of course, people don’t take what Jesus taught seriously anymore since even Christians don’t believe in Jesus’ teaching, as proven by the fact that an overwhelming majority of Christians in America elected the devil’s own as president for the second time, believing he’s the Second Coming.

This is where the conventional wisdom of “to each her own perspective, from each ‘my truth’” has brought us.

Must our conceptions, whether rational or irrational, condition our perceptions? Conceptions are made by thought, which is based on memory and experience, and the more psychological memory and experience, the less direct perception.

It’s only in the spaces between thoughts and conceptions, or better still, when the movement of thought falls silent, that we perceive things as they actually are.

That’s why it’s essential to take at least 20 minutes a day to simply observe, beginning with delighting in sensory perception in nature and ending the illusory observer that judges, compares and associates, is vital to our growth as human beings in this frightful world.

As Keats poetically put it, beauty and truth are synonymous, and can only be perceived when thought effortlessly ceases its chattering and conceptualizing.

And yes, these are words and conceptions too, not the thing. But if one playfully and intensely experiments with observation, one begins perceiving what is, and going beyond it.

Indeed, perception is always beginning, which is the true meaning of having a “beginner’s mind.”

© Scoop Media