Tuesday, August 4
Oregon Health Authority: deaths 333 (+5) cases 19,699 (+333)
M’s new tee shirt has finally arrived, allowing him to delve further into Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s The Phenomenology of Perception, a work of deep abstraction and profound irrelevance. Nevertheless, off we go.
Let’s start with Merleau-Ponty’s ideas about what is known as the Müller-Lyer illusion:
The German sociologist Franz Carl Müller-Lyer devised this diagram in 1889. We’ve all seen variations of it by now and we know the trick. When you first see it, the three horizontal lines are all different lengths. But of course they are not, say the scientists, as can be proved with a ruler. In fact, you don’t even need a ruler. All you have to do remove all twelve of the short diagonal lines and you will be freed from the illusion.
Merleau-Ponty strongly objects to this reasoning. You will not be freed from illusion, he says, because there never was any illusion. The lines you saw at first glance in the diagram were not the same lines as the lines seen later, after you were instructed to ignore or erase all of the short diagonal lines. The lines in the diagrams were not just lines at all. What you saw first were three complex shapes, because that’s how perception works. If you erase all the winglets (the short diagonal lines) you’re not looking at the same thing any more. The horizontal lines that are component parts of the complete designs are neither equal nor unequal to the lines without winglets; they are merely different.
We know they are different because we just saw the difference with our own eyes. There is a reason that we see the difference and that reason lies in the nature of perception. We see the difference because–after centuries of evolution–that’s how our eyes and brains work. So we were never mistaken, never in the thrall of an illusion. In fact, we are being tricked, but we are being tricked by the scientist who is attempting to sucker us into believing that real experience and natural perception are inherently inferior to the idealizations that are the foundation of a scientific definition of knowledge. Scientists, says M-P, are both naive and dishonest. In the specialized vision of “objective” science, it is valid and useful to speak of equal and unequal lines. Science achieves its clarity by departing from the reality of experience into the realm of abstract reasoning about reality. But if we want to know what is really going on in the world, and what makes humans do what we do, the model fails because it is precisely the human perceiver that must be removed in order for the model to proceed.
For Merleau-Ponty, we cannot explain the Müller-Lyer illusion by assuming that there exists some thing in the world called a line, another thing in the world called consciousness, another thing in the world called the observer who has the consciousness, and an event in the world called perception which connects them all and which sometimes goes wrong. For M-P, the world is perception and that’s all it is. “I” do not “perceive” the “world.” Those three words are all just different names for the same thing.
He goes on to say that we can reflect on our perception world, we can reason about our perception world, and we can also imagine different perception worlds. Humans do a lot of all those things. But our thoughts or acts of imagination about the world do not exist apart from us–and nor does anything else–though it is easy to mistakenly think that they do. Implicit in this critique, I think, is the idea that such thoughts and imaginings can help us, but they can also lead us very far astray. The difficulty about perception is that it is so basic and all-encompassing that we forget about it. And when we do that, we forget ourselves. The project of phenomenology, it seems, is to remind us.
Meanwhile…math. An article in our paper today has this headline: “Second-lowest COVID case total since July 8.” Inside, the article says “The new daily case total…is the lowest number reported in the past 12 days…and the second-lowest since July 8.” Does the article also mention that yesterday’s total of test results was the lowest since June 15th and that yesterday’s test positive ratio was one of the highest on record? No, these details are omitted.
Wednesday, August 5
Oregon Health Authority: deaths 338 (+5) cases 19,979 (+280)
Arrived at the coast a bit after 4:00 and got settled into our kitchen-equipped room at the Inn at Otter Crest. Here’s E getting settled.
When her kids were young, E had a time-share in the Otter Crest complex and has many good memories of the place. She hadn’t seen it though, for more than twenty years. It’s still very nice. We took a walk down from the Inn to the hamlet of Otter Rock, where there’s a Mo’s Chowder restaurant, a surf and skate shop call Pura Vida, and a café called Cliffside Coffee and Sweets. Mo’s was closed, but business was good at the surf shop, with lots of people returning their rented wetsuits after a day of surfing. The coffee shop was also busy, with a line of young people out the door, some masked, some not, and nobody distancing. Sigh.
Back in the room, our dinner was hamburgers with lettuce, cheese, ketchup, dill slices and a big beautiful tomato. It was great. The corn on the cob would have been great too, except that we didn’t remember to bring it. Fortunately, we had remembered the tempranillo.
Thursday, August 6
Oregon Health Authority: deaths 339 (+1) cases 20,636 (+246)
This morning we drove about 50 miles up the coast to this place called Cape Lookout.
It’s a two-mile finger of basalt that dates back to a time of massive lava flows about 15 million years ago. The hike is 4.8 miles in total, beginning at a parking area somewhere among the trees in the upper right of this photo. The first part of the trail goes along the south rim. Here’s the view from there.
Later the trail crosses to the north edge. Here’s a view looking directly down from that side.
The plant life on the cape is spectacular, with giant old-growth hemlock and Sitka spruce growing right up to the edges of the 400-foot cliffs on either side. The lush undergrowth of salal and ferns is almost impenetrable. The trail is smooth and well-graded–at first. Then it mostly isn’t. It had rained the night before and we ran into a little mud here and there. Also a few roots.
Friday, August 7
Oregon Health Authority: deaths 348 (+9) cases 20,636 (+411)
Returned home today from our coastal adventures, tired and a little out of sorts. It’s not the coast’s fault. We had a wonderful hike that was followed by a fine take-out meal from Local Ocean in Newport. We shared a beautiful sunset and a very tasty Black cod dinner in our little dining nook looking out at the sunset.
So that was all good. But then we made the mistake of watching the final hour and a half of Kördüğüm/I Am Blind, which Netflix inexplicably calls Intersection. The last few episodes had been a little clumsy. They had their moments, but there had been some continuity failures, such as the time Naz gave Ali Nejat his ring back at the end of one episode and was busy arranging wedding decorations at the beginning of the next. Then Naz was killed, which took a lot of sparkle out of the story. It was almost as if some of the remaining actors felt it too. By the second to the last episode they were just going through the motions, trying to get if over with. In the finale, lots of things were wrapped up and happiness seemed to be in the cards for several couples, but none of it was terribly satisfying or particularly moving. We blame the story runners for losing inspiration right at the end. But maybe it wasn’t all their fault. Maybe it’s just us expecting too much. The final stages of any addiction are much less fun than the beginning; that’s the way it goes.
Saturday, August 8
Oregon Health Authority: deaths 355 (+7) cases 21,010 (+374)
More gardening today. M mowed, dug weeds and extended an irrigation line; E fought in both the weed wars and the mite wars, fertilized a bunch of things, and picked up a bushel of fallen apples. She found a few apples from the far tree that were edible. M tried a good looking one from the near tree, but it was still bitter. Patience.
Dinner came from Ba’s in Albany. Ginger chicken with rice and kimchi for M, vegetarian noodle salad with egg rolls for E.
Then, continuing with the gardening motif, we watched a documentary called The Biggest Little Farm, which was suggested to us by a veterinarian we know. It’s the story of a couple who leave their tiny apartment in Santa Monica and go off into the wilds of Ventura County to do farming the old-fashioned way. Along the way they are mentored by Alan York, a master horticulturist with whom we were already familiar from having read about his work with biodynamic vineyards in Oregon. The Biggest Little Farm is an inspiring story and it’s helping us deal with our Turkish soap withdrawal issues.
Sunday, August 9
Oregon Health Authority: deaths 356 (+1) cases 21,272 (+262)
A quiet Sunday. We had a long walk in the cool of the morning. Did a few errands, including the carwash and the candy store. E did some alterations and read poetry. M made some progress on his British crossword, a Sunday Times Jumbo cryptic from 2006. He’s been working on it for weeks. Just five clues left.
Monday, August 10
Oregon Health Authority: deaths 357 (+1) cases 21,488 (+216)
Monday is our new grocery shopping day. M went to Market of Choice; E went to Natural Grocers. No trouble with any of the things on our list.
M has penetrated a bit further into Phenomenology of Perception, where he found this:
An object looks attractive or repulsive before it looks black or blue, circular or square.
Cited by Merleau-Ponty in PofP, the quote comes originally from a 1925 book by Kurt Koffka, who is best known as one of the trio of German psychologists who developed Gestalt theory in the 1930’s. I don’t what exactly this sentence means. I don’t know if it is true or not. I don’t know whether it much matters. But it’s a good example of the kind of thing that phenomenologists find important. It is an indication, they would say, about the nature of reality, about what is important and what is not.