| Think of film and its discrete images melding into a continuous stream. Paraphrasing Leibniz and his ideas of the confused-distinct spectrum of knowledge (as opposed to the obscure-clear spectrum):
"It is the indistinction that produces the image we see as we experience a film. Thus, the property of confusion is essential to the experience itself; the distinct images, those little perceptions, need to synthesize and integrate into a unified perception in order for that experience to occur. Thus, the experience is instrincsically indistinct, because in order to be that experience, it must maintain its characteristic synthetic unity, which depends on the confusion of its parts" (22).
"An indistinct perception is therefore, in some sense, real: it exists independently of the agent's capacities in the specific sense that no effort of cognition will render it distinct without changing the character of the perception in question. . . . Those aspects of the world that escape the countability of individuality reveal the aesthetic underpinnings of individuality" (23). |
| "The pre-Socratics, notably Parmenides, founded philosophy as an exercise in the mistrust of experience. The history of knowledge reads as a progressive questioning of previous assumptions about reality. From the depths of our organismic origins, evolution committed us to an unexamined naïve realism: as organism, we have to believe that this event follows that one; we have to trace effects to their causes in order to survive for any length of time in the environment, in order to escape our predators and obtains means of sustenance. But the philosophical attitude and the scientific reason that is its extension derive from a critique of these evolutionarily conditioned assumptions about reality." |
