We want to write here a short note on an idea we had recently, under the influence of some of the talks at the PPWC conference 2024, where the idea of a more active kind of sensation was mentioned, the idea of actively listening to ways the body feels and sees things (this was actually mentioned in a number of talks or their private Q&As under the name of somatic therapy, or something of that sort). Since this made us think in a new way about sensation, or at least made us reflect about the ways we typically think about it, we want to share here this contextualization also in relation to our understanding of systems theory, rationality/logic and the idea of "emotion".
When we think about sensation, or experience in general, it can be understood in two very different ways: as something I do or as something that happens to me; or maybe as both, or neither. In one typical view, we view our sensations as ports, or connections, to which we can listen, and where our sensations only really come to us if we look, and in another typical view, we understand them as something that overwhelms us, or as something that blocks out thinking entirely. For the reason of the presence of overwhelmingness of most of our life experience, our understanding was that the physical or bare psychological aspect of perception is mostly passive and involuntary, and that the active aspect is mostly in cognitive filtering; however, we now think that actually both aspects could be part of either system, and that does change the way we think about these, in two particular ways: in the active aspect of sensation, and in the passive aspect of cognition/intentionality. Those two aspects can be roughtly understood to be the autonomy of the body as an active participant in the psychological (althought maybe not the subjective) system, and of the presence of something like an unconscious, as a kind of (pseudo-)headmate, in the subjective system, although those are probably not the best terms. What we mostly want to talk about though, is what this means for sensation as such, what it means for appearances of things and also for the way we see the phenomenal body (Leib).
Take the example of seeing. It has certain aspects that are active and those which are passive, which make it on the whole difficult to characterize as an action: the direction and tilt of the head, as well as the openness or closedness of the eye lids is active, but the light is a passive influx; there are passive changes in that viewing, such as getting used to brighter or darker rooms, which is also aided to some extent by subjective elements, such as who is currently fronting, which leads us to assume that there is a certain passive element embedded all the way in the subjective system, taking control of different elements of psychological modes of perception; and even those elements originally considered active, like the open or closed lid, is not fully under my control, as by sleepiness. All this is rather trivial, but the real question then is that of psychological perception and subjective apperception, which are quite different from the physiological mechanism. For example, (external) perception would be impossible under conditions such as sleep or coma, as would be apperception, but perception is also present under certain condition - as disregarding something - where active apperception is not. What I disregard, I don't actively categorize as to be disregarded; I simply "don't see it", which means in my view roughly that I might percieve it, but that that perception never gets any attention and therefore does not become an element of any subjective reflections; it is only a _possible_ intentional object, not an actual one. In this sense it is true that the cognitive element is mostly active, not in that it cannot happen passively, but that the mechanism of exclusion from the zone of intentionality is a passive threshold under which perceptions, even if psychologically active, don't get "seen" by my consciousness. In other words, consciousness is only _relatively_ active, in that it is based on a passivity it can't itself control.
This phenomenon however is important to be differentiated from subjective effects of filterings. For example: if I don't notice the difference between two shades of green, and therefore do not consciously notice a shape I may already have percieved, that is quite a different thing than noticing it, regarding it as unimportant and then moving on. This form of active filtering is also important, and a part of "seeing" something; but it is not quite as passive as the ignorance due to not reaching the threshold of mental notability in the first place. And even the conscious ignorance is something quite more basic again then actually regarding something as important at first, then thinking about it and disregarding it for certain reasons, as the regarding in the original case does not need to have any specific reasons for it, it might be simply for lack of time or consideration on the part of a particular headmate for example.
The fundamental question here, on which the difference however is based, is that of the notion of freedom within the subjective system as opposed to the others. The prejudice, which we believed in before, and which overshadowed all of these quite obvious phenomena, was the assumption, that the body had to be passive and the mind active because the mind is the place of free will and the body is not. Active perception then is connected, at least proportedly, to the quite awkward question if the body indeed has a will of its own, and if it is free in it; or if even, in a strange way, I would be, and other headmates alongside me, a kind of "will of the body", a pure property or epiphenomenon of something else that wants to think and be conscious of something.
But we don't think we really need to decide anything like that. We can be active and passive, and so can be the body. The clear dualism of activity and passivity is a result of the reduction of the subject-object of action and passion to a cleanly either active subject or passive object, when really, the same thing or person can be, in certain situation, active participants and in other passive recipiants. (This thing then would be neither an idea nor an element of discourse, but in fact be the object behind ideas, as described in other places; it would be that what knowledge is about, not that knowledge/perception itself.) The will does not need to be uniformly free to be free at all, it can be momentarily free, and it does not have to be free in the sense of being completely open; it can have its inner determinacies, that are connected to others in unclear ways. All of that is to say, that this question is rather open, and does not justify hastely conclusions, neither that perception and cognition would have to be on one side or the other, and neither minds nor bodies; which also gives rise to the possibility of other things besides activity and passivity, and besides bodies and minds, and also relieves us from reductionist ideas of categorizing anything that is, and instead acknowledging, that activity or passivity is one aspect of perception and cognition, and not the only one that is important of it, certainly not one it can be reduced to. Similarly, all of these processes happen simultaneously in various levels of detail or abstract reality; and so, the seperation of elements in biology, psyche and subject, are also merely conceptually a clean distinction of substantive things, but are actually differentiations of aspects of the same things, where the only things that really neatly fall in only one of those categories are those forms of interactions themselves, whichs hiding or reduction constitutes the next layer of complexity. Overall, we have a very open situation, that indeed does not fit the older binary differentiation of active subject and passive object, but also does not force us to a decision on the question of freedom that forces us to determinism, or other choices like that.
Another question related to this is that of discrete or continuous kinds of perception, that is, if, when I percieve something, I percieve merely that thing in general or to a certain degree. Here we can draw back to a number of classical theoretical position that in my view still hold (such as, that quantities have no degree, and are therefore clearly distinguished, as I tried to define them here), but they don't really help in identifying forms of perception. Clearly, I can notice something on my skin; but is it a quantity of a quality? I certainly can't express it in numbers, but the idea that every possible sensation is distinct from any other also seems a bit much. Maybe there is a kind of quantification (like various variables on each skin spot that I then each see quantitatively, but which's position is a quality as a position in a list/set etc.), but that does not actually help me see which kinds of perceptions happen through it, only that the quantification is much less obvious than with visual shapes.
The real issue here is there is a long established discussion on vision as a philosophical idea and metaphor, but not for hearing, smell, taste, feeling, temperature, balance etc. I don't think I could provide anything like that in a short form either, but we think this does mean that we should try to study the current level of research on these other senses with more interest, as they have not even created a clear list of disprovable absurdities, let alone interesting ideas that could be correct. And interesting, these forms also include the most active of senses: the movement of the body, eating, touching, smelling etc. are all much more active forms of perception than seeing or hearing (which is the exception of being an understudied passive sense, along a few others like the sense of hunger or of constipation, of which there is also no equivalent of transcendental aesthetics). These various functions also describe more closely the discontinuous unity of the body, which is present to vision only as un-real or as outside its own imagination, as vision is in some sense external to the seen body (see our writing on the gendered body for a more detailled description of that).
What consequences does this have now? We want to give a few short remarks on what it means for a few common cases of contexts, in which perception are taken to be a part of a certain system of understanding. For systems theory, the main element here is the idea that interaction is action, and that elements/interactors are actors. In fact, this need not be true; it can also be passive interaction (or one might also say passion if not for the connotations of that word in the English language). This passive form of interaction is specifically important at the boundary, or at the interaction with the environment: whether it is acted on or acts on. This distinction can be important in historical review of social systems, for example (as in the historical question of the relation of humanity with the larger natural environment, and the change from acted-upon to acting-upon in the industrial period, with all the headaches that we still have to deal with that to this day, of not quite knowing what nature and our relationship to it truly is). But even within a system such a relationality, or the knowledge that it is there, is hugely important in not promoting false notions of free exchange in descriptions of one-sided interactions (as sometimes themselves describing it this way, as in the case of the "free market exchange" and other comparable situations).
In the case of the theory of "emotion", as a description as specific knowledges of perceptions, pains and experiences, activity and passivity hold an important role in stabilizing the ideological functionality of these theories, of describing a passive "emotion" opposed to active "cognition" (for reasons of a similar logical standing as the description of free will opposition of subject and object above, but the added problem of not even being clearly to differentiate between "emotion" and "expression/effect of emotion"). The dynamization of this difference then holds great importance for a description of all elements of perception, that this theory holds onto, but without its inner absurdities and complications, which are centralized precisely on this difference and its near inexplanability.
And lastly, I want to say something about the topic of rationality, or the idea of realized logic, that is so often paired with an active, anti-perceptual or anti-sensitive sense of cognition. If action and passivity are as unclearly seperated as I claim, even in basic perceptions of primary phenomena, which were always held as principle elements of observation, even in the heights of positivism, then we simply cannot hold on to a picture of logic of taking passive observations and acting on them, creating theories etc. There are active elements in perception and passive elements in theory-creation too. This however does not mean, that there are certain psychological elements embedded in abstract logic, as much as activity of perception does also not mean rationality in sensation. Instead, this passivity in theory-creation is a new, theoretical passivity; it is a kind of theoretical reservoir guiding active thinking the same way as active perception can shape the passive structures of perception too, and can interact with them. In this sense, this theoretical reservoir can then create structures, even for abstract thinking, that are more than formal symbols or externally, sensitively recognized marks; it can create cognitive object-permanence on the level of most abstract understanding; it could even be considered a subjective, half-well substitute for the heaven of ideas, for something permanently passive in understanding of the yet so distant absolutely abstract. This abstractness in cognition then maybe could even create such a thing as an understanding of reality, or, as Hegel once that, that truth exists; of an idea of object that can, beyond the difference of passive perception or active wish, behind all discursive or intentional misrepresentations, create the unity of an object, which constitutes the reality of which the various distinctions, which we can understand and create as its kinds of substantiality, can even be true in the first place.
And by them, it can create then a connection to active perception too, as a more mobile form of this creation of substantiality; as an element of active decision, of what to see or feel, as a form of perception almost readable to thought, would its decisions only have been intentional and not perceptive. In this way, as a way of almost-overlap that cannot be bridged, there is an affinity between theoretical passivity and active perception; it is the sense, in which they both, precisely by destroying the older simpler model of reality as actively filtered passivity, create this notion of an object, which beyond the idea of arbitrary subjective constitution makes at first possible the very concept of an external, non-discursive, but only eidetically approachable system of reality.