Reading the world

We read the word wondering
what we mean by it.

We read the world wondering
what it means by us.

The sense of wonder is a primary spiritual capacity. But we tend to waste it on extraordinary or imaginary phenomena, because our habits tend to blind us to the ordinary wonders right under our noses. Like all of our habits, we tend to take our perceptual reading skills for granted – especially our skills at reading ‘texts’ (such as other people’s faces) that we are most predisposed to read. One way of gaining a new respect for the range and depth of such reading is to consider some unusual cases. Murray Gell-Mann takes up one of these:

The man in question, Dr. Arthur Lintgen of Pennsylvania, said he could look at a record of fully orchestrated post-Mozart classical music and identify the composer, often the piece, and sometimes even the performing artist. [Professional magician and debunker James] Randi subjected him to his usual rigorous tests and discovered that he was telling the exact truth. The physician correctly identified two different recordings of Stravinsky’s ‘Rite of Spring’, as well as Ravel’s ‘Bolero’, Holst’s ‘The Planets’, and Beethoven’s ‘Sixth Symphony.’ Naturally Randi showed him some other records as controls. One, labeled ‘gibberish’ by Dr. Lintgen, was by Alice Cooper. On seeing another control, he said, ‘This is not instrumental music at all. I’d guess that it’s a vocal solo of some kind.’ In fact it was a recording of a man speaking …

— Gell-Mann (1994, 290)

Gell-Mann comments, ‘This odd claim that turned out to be genuine violated no important principle’ – meaning that it didn’t undermine currently well-supported models of either biology or physics. On the contrary, it shows that the natural semiotic processes by which people extract meaning from physical signs (sinsigns) can be more powerful and versatile than we usually give them credit for.

One more specific example (from Wegner 2002, but also found in other sources): a horse called ‘Clever Hans’ became famous in Germany around 1900 because he could apparently add, subtract, multiply, divide, read, spell, and identify musical tones, answering questions by tapping his hoof. It took a persistent investigator named Pfungst to figure out that Hans was doing all this by reading very subtle body language cues from his trainer and other humans – cues so subtle that the trainer himself was wholly unaware of them. So Hans really was ‘clever’ enough to fool quite a few humans, but not because he was trying to, and not by violating any basic principles of equine psychology. This case does not undermine the consensus that using symbolic language is beyond the skill of a horse, but it does extend our understanding of how meaning can happen biologically (and without conscious intent) – because Herr Pfungst managed to explain the apparent anomaly by means of careful empirical observation.

Sensory perception is far more worthy of wonder than speculations about extrasensory perception. Ordinary experience of the natural world is infinitely more wonderful than stories of the supernatural. Perhaps the greatest wonder of all is the continuous presence of the phaneron – if only we could look it in the face.

Wherever you turn, there is the Face of God.

Qur’án 2:115 (Cleary)

Limits of Interpretation

The number of coherent interpretations of a text may be infinite, but not all interpretations are coherent.

Texts frequently say more than their authors intended to say, but less than what many incontinent readers would like them to say. Independent of any alleged intention of the author is the intention of the text. But a text exists only as a physical object, as a Linear Text Manifestation. It is possible to speak of text intentions only as the result of a conjecture on the part of the reader. The initiative of the reader basically consists in making a conjecture about the text intention. A text is a device conceived in order to produce its Model Reader. Such a Model Reader is not the one who makes the only right conjecture. A text can foresee a Model Reader entitled to try infinite conjectures. But infinite conjecture does not mean any possible conjecture.

— Eco (1990, 148)

Eco follows this up with an example of how some conjectural readings of a passage in Finnegans Wake – which is ‘itself a metaphor for the process of unlimited semiosis’ (Eco 1979, 70) – are tested and refuted by invoking the principle of ‘internal textual coherence.’ The scientific method of ‘conjectures and refutations’ (Popper 1968) also takes coherence as a leading principle, although it also brings experience of the external world to bear on the question, by making observations which could refute even an internally coherent conjecture. The method of the artist is essentially the same, according to Gombrich (2002); he calls it ‘schema and correction’ or ‘making before matching.’ If the goal of a drawing, for instance, is an accurate depiction of an object, you have to make the drawing before you can see how well it matches the object.

A hypothesis is a model or theory on probation. An explicit model is a habit on probation; an established (‘fixed,’ ‘proven’) habit acts implicitly.

Who means?

It has been said of Boehme that his books are like a picnic to which the author brings the words and the reader the meaning. The remark may have been intended as a sneer at Boehme, but it is an exact description of all works of literary art without exception.

— Northrop Frye (1947, 427-8)

This would certainly apply to works of literary art – and to scriptures – which function as turning symbols. Do they differ in this respect from scientific works, or philosophical works, which can also work as turning symbols? That depends on the nature of the objects of these symbols, and the nature of the collateral experience of those objects which the reader brings to the act of meaning. That is always the reader’s act, although the Truth of the symbol (argument or proposition) must be, for the reader, independent of the reader’s personal belief.

Turning how?

How can scripture reading come to pierce an ox hide?

— T’ien-t’ung (Cleary 1997b, 322)

Where does a gnox hide? Who knows?
Our habit is to read utterances like these as rhetorical questions – as if we gnew the answers. A reading practice like Dogen‘s challenges this habit, challenges us to penetrate the shell of habits. Symbols which are only symbols do not act as turning signs: ‘Strictly pure Symbols can signify only things familiar, and those only in so far as they are familiar’ (Peirce, CP 4.544n, 1906). The turning symbol must involve an Index directing attention beyond the familiar.

Where is the Index in this sentence?

Nor are Symbols and Indices together generally enough. The arrangement of the words in the sentence, for instance, must serve as Icons, in order that the sentence may be understood. The chief need for the Icons is in order to show the Forms of the synthesis of the elements of thought. For in precision of speech, Icons can represent nothing but Forms and Feelings.

How do you Feel?