The background
a tool of potentiality
pp. 224-242
in: Zdravko Radman (ed), Knowing without thinking, Berlin, Springer, 2012Abstract
The sometimes unbearable attractiveness of the idea of the directness of experience, or the immediacy of knowledge of the world, has a long and persistent history in philosophy and related disciplines. It comes in a variety of versions, from naïve realism to ecological approaches and certain forms of phenomenology. The idea is, additionally, cultivated in the study of consciousness where the qualitative as "raw feels' is affirmed as requiring no further mental translating and, in that sense, as being unmediated. Though some connotations of the idea of directness seem to be a welcome antipode to intellectualism, it turns out to be its overcorrection that is the problem. At the same time, the absence of thought does not necessarily preclude directness. The basic motivation of this chapter is to draw attention to the mental mechanism that takes charge of cognition and resists the hegemony of consciousness and thought.