Intelligence and Attention

My focus today is intelligence and attention and how the two hang together. Recent advances in artificial intelligence have brought both words back into public consciousness, and I want to ask whether our understanding of them is adequate to the conversations we are having. To explore both terms, I will draw on three primary traditions—twentieth-century phenomenology, contemporary philosophy of mind, and medieval contemplation—with some references to Plato, of course.

I want to explore the entangled nature of intelligence and attention and suggest that both ought to be understood within the broader field of perception itself. I will argue that, within this field, both capacities emerge as skills that need to be cultivated, and that our perception of things, at a basic level, is itself an art or craft that can be shaped through practice (askēsis). Pulling on this thread will reveal how intelligence and attention emerge from within the horizon of perception and bear on any number of important philosophical themes—including truth and conceptuality, reason and memory, values and purpose, and orientation and aim. My aim is to show how neither intelligence nor attention can be abstracted out from this larger field of activity. My hope is to generate discussion about these terms in an age increasingly shaped by new technologies that can disrupt and transform both.

I. Phenomenology and the Nature of Perception

Since my central theme today is perception, I want to start with that field most dedicated to its examination, phenomenology. Taken etymologically, phenomenology joins two terms—phenomenon and logos. In the Greek, phenomenon means “to bring to light” or “to show.” It means simply what shows itself to perception. Logos we often take to mean “to speak” or “give an account” or “to study,” but its first meaning is something closer to “gathering” or “picking up.” In a phrase, phenomenology is an account or a gathering together of what shows itself to perception. But Edmund Husserl, in many respects the founder of modern phenomenology, did not just speak of phenomenology but of transcendental phenomenology. Here the modifier adds an important dimension to our understanding. It is not just a study or account of phenomena as they appear to us but a turning back of the logos itself, going beyond what appears through an investigation into how what shows itself appears in the way it does and why it appears in that way for us as a particular kind of perceiver.¹

You do not need to be a trained phenomenologist to understand that how things appear to you and how they are may not be identical, so we need an account of how the appearing thing appears to you in the way that it does, and this, I would submit, is the task of phenomenology—delivering that higher-order understanding of how the world comes to show itself in your experience. Husserl will refer to our first encounter with the initial givenness of things as the natural attitude, which is something like a settled habit of perception, inherited and unexamined, a taken-for-granted stance that things just are how they seem to be before you inquire into the nature of your own perception.²

What is required of us to get out of the natural attitude—to a place where we can turn our attention onto perception itself, to look at our own looking—is a specific maneuver in thought Husserl calls the epochē. While the term does not originate with Husserl—we find it in the ancient skeptics and Stoics alike—it has a dual meaning that implies both “to observe, attend to” and “to delay, stop, stay.”³ It’s related to two concrete actions: the boxer’s guard and the charioteer’s reining-in of his horses. The Greek Pyrrhonians called it a “standstill of the intellect,” a suspension of judgment.⁴ Husserl uses the word to mean a holding back of our belief in the world and how it appears.⁵ This does not mean that the flux of perceiving comes to a halt; rather it refers to a new and reformed attitude toward perception, one where its character and functioning can come to light in a new way. If a phenomenon is the showing or appearing of an event in perception, the epochē allows for an intellectual glimpse into the nature of this appearing as it happens.

Husserl speaks of many types of epochē that work on different regions of perception, and only some are described as deliberate actions. He will sometimes call it a resolute decision of the will, a kind of self-imposed inhibition, performed for a time and repeated again and again.⁶ In other places, he describes the epochē as something that happens to us, not as an act of will but as an event we encounter and surrender to. We might consider the overwhelm of wonder, a moment of confusion, a confrontation with an irresolvable problem, or an encounter with a person who arrests our sense of understanding, all pointing to events outside our control.⁷ In each sense, the epochē forces us to rethink our perceptions in a basic way such that, in Husserl’s words, “a complete transformation of all of life is attained,” inaugurating “a thoroughly new way of life.”⁸ At its highest pitch, he compares the epochē to a religious conversion, incurring “the greatest existential transformation.”⁹

One of the primary observations we can make from this position concerns the intentional nature of perception. This is to say that perceptions of any kind—whether of a thought, feeling, person, idea, thing, event, or process—are defined first by their directedness or aboutness. Everything experienced can thus be characterized as an experience of something. This kind of directedness does not deliver either a sheer fact or a bare sensation. Rather, the world arrives already shaped and full of value. As Husserl continues, in the natural attitude, things come to us with “value-characters such as beautiful or ugly, agreeable or disagreeable, pleasant or unpleasant.” They “stand there as objects to be used, the ‘table’ with its ‘books,’ the ‘glass to drink from,’ the ‘vase,’ the ‘piano.’” People show up as “friends” or “foes,” “strangers” or “relatives.”¹⁰ Each thing stands out against a horizon, a background field that is present but unattended to, within which it makes sense to us.

Attention—or prosochē, a relative of epochē, here marking a movement toward rather than a suspension from—is the activity that selects importance and priority from within this field of activity, organized by some aim or orientation, a point I will return to later. For now I want to underscore the distinction between bare facts or sensations and Husserl’s own argument that what shows up for us in perception is already formed and valued, that things show up as something before we think about them.

Whether that indicates that perception itself has a rational or conceptual structure has been the subject of much discussion, notably in the debate between Hubert Dreyfus and John McDowell. For Dreyfus, concepts play a role in our acting and perceiving when we are learning to make sense of a new situation, in which case we are engaged in an explicit and representational form of understanding, one that gives way to a more immediate mode of nonconceptual and absorbed coping with the acquisition of skill. Dreyfus’s claim, which I think is correct, is that if we investigate our routine navigation of the world—walking, sitting, standing on the bus—we do not engage in detached rational reflection about what concepts to use; we’ve simply learned and absorbed the correct rules through practice and repetition. Attention is what we pay when things don’t go as we thought they would. For McDowell, rational and conceptual mindedness pervades our perceptual experience as such, including in our sensory awareness and intentional bodily movements, as both are what deliver the meaningful content we need to know about our world in order to act in it.

I think there’s something right about this claim, too, but the best account of the situation comes from Alva Noë, who accepts aspects of both claims. It is true, says Noë, that our regular engagements in the world are not mediated by modes of explicit rational reflection, but this does not by itself cancel out the possibility of our perceptions being conceptually pervaded. Noë takes aim at how we conceive of concepts and judgments in the first place. We have, in his words, been “over-intellectualizing the intellect,”¹¹ and with it what we take a concept to be. Noë thinks it wrong to imagine a concept as a detached representation we must consult in a space separate from our everyday sensing; instead, he treats the concept as a skill we execute within perception itself. As Noë puts it, “Understanding a concept is having a skill” and “It is understanding that brings the world into focus for perceptual consciousness.”¹² In this sense, thought and perception form one fabric, and it is this fabric that brings the world to presence for us in experience.

A few important entailments follow from Noë’s skill-based view of perception. The first is that all learning is in a sense perceptual learning, including a training of the senses. Education (paideia) is the education of the faculties of perception. The second is that, as a set of skills, perception is not something given once and for all but is something that needs to be exercised repeatedly, with the consequence that the opposite is also true: perception can be deadened through lack of exercise. The third is that what shows up for us in perception lies on the other side of our practices. What separates the skilled perceiver from the novice—think of the champion boxer, the master chess player, the sommelier, or the adept contemplative—is not just a set of abstract understandings but a whole different world, or at least a region of it, that is brought into focus in deeper and more articulated ways at the level of perception itself. In Noë’s words, “The point is that we are cultivated ourselves—learning to talk and read and dance and dress and play guitar and do mathematics and physics and philosophy—and in this cultivation worlds open up that would otherwise be closed off. In this way we achieve for ourselves new ways of being present.”¹³

This is all in line with many of Husserl’s claims, but it leaves us in an odd situation. A claim can be non-discursive (“pre-predicative,” as Husserl says) but still rational, while a predicative statement can be rational but not true. For Husserl, pre-predicative perception is itself pervaded by rationality (i.e., rationality is present in perception before I can make verbal or logical claims about it), but this sense of perception being rationally pervaded does not entail that perception is always truth pervaded. In other words, the true and the rational are not the same thing, and my taking a stance of rationality pervading perception does not mean I think our perceptions are always veridical; it just means that we take things to be a certain way—endowed with a certain meaning and significance—and that way could be wrong, but this taking-things-to-be-a-certain-way should nevertheless be considered rational. In this sense, rationality is necessary but not sufficient for truth; truth is what rationality aims at, but the aiming can miss or fall short. As Husserl puts it, “It can always happen that the further course of experience will compel us to abandon what has already been set down and justified in the light of empirical canons of rightness. It was, so we afterwards say, mere illusion, hallucination, merely a coherent dream, and the like.”¹⁴

Appearances can deceive us, then, and illusions are real phenomena that have to be sorted out from what is genuinely the case in a given moment. But these corrections happen within the field of appearing itself, by means of further appearing, not by stepping outside the field altogether. What would that even mean? We never leave the field of what is given, whether what is given is a thing we sense, a number or a proof, a relation, a memory, an essence, or another person’s experience. That something shows itself only under certain conditions of perception does not make it unreal, or indeed “only” an appearance.¹⁵ Reality, in this view, is not what lies behind appearance but what comes to presence by means of it, whether that be through scientific, aesthetic, contemplative, or philosophic modes of understanding.¹⁶ This inverts the more simplistic view that first-person experience is something to be overcome always and everywhere, and implies instead that perception must be trained and cultivated, not escaped or abandoned. This cultivation amounts to a training of receptivity and responsiveness, to our becoming more present to the events unfolding before us in perception.

II. Intelligence in Hugh of St. Victor

To return, then, to attention, it is in its selective functioning that I see some initial connections with intelligence. I want to read intelligence less as something someone has—though it is also that, at least as something like a natural potential—and more as something someone cultivates, and to suggest that this cultivation is tied deeply to our active sensing and perceiving.

I can grant any number of definitions of this word—learning, understanding, judging, reasoning, planning, abstracting, problem-solving, and calculating all come to mind—and I’m still left wanting. Why? What’s missing from each of these terms is a sense for the orientation of these actions. What should be learned? What should be planned? What should be understood? These choices are an integral part of what intelligence is. “Intelligence,” so understood, isn’t specifically about logic or processing speed or pattern recognition—though these factors are involved—it is more about choice and aim: knowing the right choice to make, the right aim to pursue. But how do you know what is the right choice to make or the right aim to pursue? That is the measure of intelligence.

The etymology is relevant here. Intelligence is a combination of inter (“between”) and legere (“choose, pick out, read”).¹⁷ One sense of intelligence, then, suggests something like “choosing or discerning among,” a refined discriminatory capacity. And here we can see the limitations of our common definitions: Calculation doesn’t tell you what to calculate. Problem-solving doesn’t tell you what to solve. Planning doesn’t tell you what to plan. Intelligence in the fuller sense thus includes, beyond the operations of the intellect, the bigger question of what to attend to, and equally importantly, what not to attend to.

In an essay titled “Guarding the Eye in the Age of Show,” the Austrian philosopher and medievalist Ivan Illich notes that, etymologically, “neglect” means “not read.”¹⁸ We often define neglecting as a mode of “ignoring,” “overlooking,” or “forgetting,” so it’s worth parsing out how Illich lands at this connection to reading. Neglegere combines nec- (or ne-) for “not” with legere for “picking out,” “gathering,” or “collecting.” In these older senses, neglect suggests something like “not gathering, not collecting.” However, the root word, legere, is also connected to notions of reading. The past participle here is lectus, as in our words for “lecture,” “lectern,” and “lesson,” and this leg- and lect- family of terms is what connects reading and gathering.

In his In the Vineyard of the Text, a meditation on the Victorine theologian Hugh of St. Victor, Illich makes much use of this connection between reading and gathering. As he says there, “what legere and lectio meant for Hugh is the subject of the entire book.” To illustrate their connection, Illich likens the page to a vineyard or a garden. “When Hugh reads,” Illich writes, “he harvests; he picks the berries from the lines.” Pushing the image further, Illich notes how our word for page, pagina, refers “to a row of vines joined together.” Mixing metaphors, Illich describes the physical act of reading thusly: “The act of reading with the eyes implies an activity not unlike a search for firewood: his eyes must pick up the letters of the alphabet and bundle these into syllables.”¹⁹ We gather letters into syllables and syllables into words and words into sentences and sentences into meanings. Hugh was writing during a time when texts, decorated and adorned as they were with ornaments, colors, and foliages, were to be understood and engaged with alongside a larger constellation of aesthetic artifacts and practices—monasteries and cathedrals, stained glass, scents and incense, liturgies and choirs—within which book reading was but one element. The whole setting was a carefully architected affordance environment designed to focus attention and transformation.

Further, “reading” here isn’t just private book reading, but the larger act of interpreting or “picking out” and “gathering” what becomes present in perception itself. Perception is itself just this kind of gathering, but instead of syllables, words, and sentences, we also gather together sights, scents, colors, and sounds into the recognizable wholes we encounter in everyday perception. Attention, on this view, repeats in more general perceptual terms the selective process we just reviewed in literary ones.

In Hugh’s Christian cosmology, what perception “reads” is the book of creation, a field of reality saturated with signs and symbols. Phenomena, in this view, don’t so much acquire a meaning projected upon them; rather, they are themselves signs within a more encompassing and intelligible order, and our perception is one of the places where their significance is felt. Our skillful perception and attention are the matrix within which such meanings and beings come to presence for us in experience. There is a hermeneutic at work here, but it is a hermeneutic of perception in general, rather than just an interpretation of texts of the bookish kind. “Reading” in this broader sense involves attending to what is coming to presence for perception, how we are able to receive it, and then apprehending its significance. This is another way of referring to what I think of as the skills of perception.

The sense of reading-as-gathering is clear in the vineyard and firewood images, and it’s along these lines we can understand “neglect” as “not gathering,” which is to say “not reading.” It might be intuitive to read neglect in the negative—as an activity that marks a lack of care or interest in something that otherwise deserves our attention—but Illich uses the term in a more positive sense. For Illich, neglect can be an important activity in the cultivation of perception, an action more connected to a discipline of withholding, of not attending to what doesn’t warrant our attention.

In the “Guarding” essay, it is the capacity for this kind of neglect that has been robbed from us “in the age of show.” Illich wrote the piece in 1993 with that technological context in mind—a moment where screens were just beginning to overtake our everyday life. Today, the natural extension to smartphones, AI, and social media is obvious. “Guarding the eye,” in Illich’s terms, means to have a disciplined sense for what deserves attention and what doesn’t, and that sense for what really matters is often blurred by social media, television, and advertising, all of which present us with a stream of images and sounds, often full of scenes not of our own choosing.

But Illich’s concern isn’t just our in-the-moment risk of distraction but the larger ways that what presents itself to us externally, on the screen, comes to deform our capacity for imagination. Illich interprets imagination along the lines of an active and creative process, a mode of poiēsis (creation) as he describes it in the essay. As the show comes to dominate our perception, outwardly, it over time weakens our poetic faculty, internally. The “show” removes us from the stance of creation and participation and toward a mode of consumption, its ubiquity in the end robbing us of the capacity for neglect altogether, or at least making it harder to achieve. Neglect, in this context, is the positive activity of guarding the eye and the imagination from that which we shouldn’t wish to metabolize into memory, what Husserl likens to a process of sedimentation.²⁰

Illich’s point is that we have to think about the specific practices, instruments, and modes of ascetic training together if we are to understand how it is that human and world alike are rendered present to us in different ways at different moments in history. Illich’s concern with perception here is as much ethical as it is epistemological. It is our hexis (Aristotle’s term for our settled disposition) that is at stake when considering the overall habits and technologies that shape our perception through virtue and vice alike. Illich wants us to recognize the ascetic practices we might deploy to intervene upon the otherwise settled nature of perceiving. There is thus as much an ethics to seeing as there is an ascetics to its cultivation. Again, neglect in this context serves to guard against vice and afford better ways of seeing through the ethical cultivation of the senses. The importance of choice and direction is palpable here. If some things are worthy of attention while others are not, then some faculty, or set of faculties, must be responsible for discriminating between them.

III. Orientation and Aim

This brings us back to the term we started with, intellegere, now available in a new light. If intellegere means to “choose between,” or sometimes “to pick out,” we can, with a little flourish, suggest that legere is a kind of reading, and we can interpret intelligence as the act of choosing “what to read.” If legere is reading, and neglegere is not reading, then intellegere is that attentive faculty which discerns the difference between them. For Illich, as we have seen, there is something of an asceticism, or practice, to these exercises of attention, a repetitive quality worth dwelling upon.

Illich doesn’t mention the word directly in these texts, but right nearby we have another term worth thinking about: relegere, which is related to our word for “religion.” The sense of religion as relegere stems from Cicero,²¹ and if we stay with this etymology, we find a spectrum of related activities that include reading, not reading, and re-reading, the latter emphasizing the importance of returning again and again to what we judge worthy of attention.

Relegere is thus the repetitive practice of reading and gathering, while intellegere is the action of choosing what to read and gather, and of knowing that such a thing should be read and gathered. Intelligence, in other words, is a kind of discernment or aim, an identification of the right telos. It is in this sense a choice—a choice of what to read, what to interpret; and, in the other direction, what to neglect, what not to read, what not to gather.

Along these lines, intelligence is a kind of choosing linked to attending in a field of already happening perceiving and appearing. But if intelligence as an act is a choice in our attention, then we have to ask: What is it that governs or guides these acts of choosing? In my etymological explorations of Hugh and Illich, I came across one more term in the legere family that can help us explore this question.

That term is diligere, which can mean several things, including “to distinguish or select,” “to value or esteem,” and, especially noteworthy for Hugh, “to love.”²² With diligere added, the family of related activities runs to five:

1. Legere: Gathering
2. Relegere: Gathering again
3. Neglegere: Not gathering
4. Intellegere: Choosing what to gather
5. Diligere: Loving what is worth gathering

I have arranged this etymological tree in a list so that we can see how entangled these activities are when read in this way. For intellegere to do its work, it must have a field from which to gather (perceptual or lexical). It must select some things and omit others, and to do this it must be oriented around some aim that guides the selecting, some end that it values or loves by which selection can proceed.

Readers of Hugh, especially in his Didascalicon: De studio legendi (“On the Study of Reading”), will know his work is organized around the teaching of different reading practices (lectio, meditatio, and contemplatio among them), and that the purpose of these exercises is to incur a transformation of the person in the direction of a specific developmental arc—for Hugh, it’s an ascent toward “divine likeness”²³—the result of which is a deepening of the attention and understanding of the person.

Such a transformative reshaping of perception through practice implies that the whole sweep of activities we have identified is not only deeply entangled but is also on the move. As these practices reshape perception through repetition, they also reshape and deepen our understanding of the aims to which they should point. In other words, love and value can and do guide intelligence, but what we repeatedly choose to attend to can reshape and transform what we understand as worth valuing to begin with.

In closing, I will summarize what I have just said with the following. Being rational means acting and perceiving for and with reasons; being intelligent means knowing how to select out from our perceptions what is important to attend to and what is important to neglect; being attentive means being able to stay focused upon what intelligence has selected from perception as important to our aims; our aims, finally, are what organize intelligence and attention alike, and this aiming is guided by our values, interests, and cares. In other words, we cannot speak of intelligence and attention outside of a normative—that is, a moral and ethical—framework of valuing. However, as we have seen, the fact that perception is pervaded by both intelligence and rationality, together with the fact that what is rational or intelligent is not necessarily true or good, means that all of these capacities we have been discussing require for their proper cultivation a certain amount of practice and training. Further, since this process extends into the level of sensation itself, to the basic way that phenomena come to presence for us in perception, this training and education must include a cultivation of the senses themselves.

This account may sound complete enough, but it leaves us with a question. If intelligence and attention are intrinsically—that is, internally—constituted in a teleological way, how are we to order the goods at which we could aim? Along these lines, we have in a sense come full circle, and we can revisit our earlier meditations on education as a training of perception, and on Husserl’s epochē and his likening of it to a religious conversion, or a turning around of the whole person, involving a complete transformation of our understanding. Are these dual themes not precisely what Plato pointed toward already in the Republic?

Here is Plato at Republic 518d–e:

Socrates: Then education is the craft [technē] concerned with doing this very thing, this turning around [periagōgē], and with how the soul can most easily and effectively be made to do it. It isn’t the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education takes for granted that sight is there but that it isn’t turned the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries to redirect it appropriately.

Glaucon: So it seems.

Socrates: Now, it looks as though the other so-called virtues [aretai] of the soul are akin to those of the body, for they really aren’t there beforehand but are added later by habit [ethos] and practice [askēsis]. However, the virtue of reason seems to belong above all to something more divine, which never loses its power [dynamis] but is either useful and beneficial or useless and harmful, depending on the way it is turned [hypo tēs periagōgēs, “by the turning around”].²⁴

There are, then, notions of choice, discernment, and aim—complexly intertwined and recursively reorganizing—operative in the performance of intelligence itself. Intelligence, in this sense, is inherently value-laden (and, in its higher pitches, implicative of moral decision making), and it is teleological, insofar as it is ingredient in the selective process that guides the human toward its aims.

The question I want to leave with you is: If intelligence needs to be turned, what should it turn toward? And what should it turn away from? Is there anything that can guide this turning in anything like a substantive way? Hugh of St. Victor understood his practice as an ascent toward likeness with God. Plato understood it as turning toward the Good. If intelligence and attention are alike in needing an aim to turn toward, to what shall we point them? Thank you.

Notes

1. In Husserl’s own words it is “the motif of inquiring back into the ultimate source of all the formations of knowledge, the motif of the knower’s reflecting upon himself and his knowing life,” Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), §26, 97. ↑

2. In the Crisis, the natural attitude makes up “‘simple’ ‘straightforward’ ongoing life” (§40, 150), surrounded by “an atmosphere of mute, concealed, but cofunctioning validities” (149). ↑

3. Epochē is the noun from epechein (ἐπέχω), “to hold upon.” Thayer gives “to have or hold upon, apply,” with τὸν νοῦν understood, “to observe, attend to,” and also “to check,” that is, “to delay, stop, stay” (Joseph Henry Thayer, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament, s.v. “ἐπέχω”). ↑

4. Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Scepticism 1.10: suspension of judgement is “a standstill of the intellect, owing to which we neither reject nor posit anything” (trans. Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes, 2nd ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). ↑

5. Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson (London: Routledge, 2012), §32: “We put out of action the general thesis which belongs to the essence of the natural standpoint,” and “I do not then deny this ‘world’, as though I were a sophist, I do not doubt that it is there as though I were a sceptic; but I use the ‘phenomenological’ ἐποχή, which completely bars me from using any judgment that concerns spatio-temporal existence (Dasein)” (59). ↑

6. See Hanne Jacobs, “Phenomenology as a Way of Life? Husserl on Phenomenological Reflection and Self-Transformation,” Continental Philosophy Review 46 (2013): 355 n. 24, on Husserl’s “resolute decision of the will” (citing Hua VI, 147, 153). See also 355 on the epochē as a “self-imposed inhibition of all worldly interest,” and 356 on “repeatedly entering the transcendental attitude.” ↑

7. See Sara Heinämaa, “From Decisions to Passions: Merleau-Ponty’s Interpretation of Husserl’s Reduction,” in Merleau-Ponty’s Reading of Husserl, ed. Ted Toadvine and Lester Embree (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2002), 131: the epochē “is not a result of a pure act of will or a decision but involves a passion,” and it “is not an accomplishment but an event.” See also 140–41 on wonder, and 146: “something that happens to us.” Sara Heinämaa, “Epoché as Personal Transformation: On the Similarities between the Philosophical Change of Attitude and Religious Conversions,” Phänomenologische Forschungen (2019): 156, says Husserl’s comparison suggests a disclosure “not in the control of egoic activities.” ↑

8. Husserl, Crisis, §40, 150. ↑

9. Husserl, Crisis, §35, 137. ↑

10. Husserl, Ideas, §27, 53. ↑

11. Alva Noë, Varieties of Presence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 9; see also chapter 6, “On Over-Intellectualizing the Intellect,” 114–33. ↑

12. Noë, Varieties of Presence, 117, 115. ↑

13. Noë, Varieties of Presence, 13. ↑

14. Husserl, Ideas, §46, 88. ↑

15. Eric D. Perl reads Plato along the same lines. “Sensibles, therefore, are not other things besides the forms, but are appearances of the forms; and the distinction of appearance from reality is not a distinction of one reality from another” (15). Nor is appearance illusion: “There is a difference between seeing an object in a mirror and having a hallucination,” and “sense-experience is deceptive only if it is mistaken for an adequate apprehension of reality.” Recognized as appearance, sense-experience “serves as a preliminary encounter with reality, a ‘reminder’ (as Plato says), pointing beyond itself and leading us toward intellection” (30 n. 12). Eric D. Perl, “Sense-Perception and Intellect in Plato,” Revue de Philosophie Ancienne 15, no. 1 (1997): 15–34. ↑

16. Husserl anticipates the obvious objections in the following ways. Against the view that physics studies an “unknown cause of appearances,” he holds that “the perceived thing itself is always and in principle precisely the thing which the physicist studies” (§52, 100). Mathematical objects are given in essential insight, which “is still intuition, just as the eidetic object is still an object” (§3, 12). Memory and empathy have evidence of their own, derived from perception and answerable to it (§§140–41, 294–96). What Husserl rejects is a reality in principle beyond all possible experience, which he calls “really nonsense,” while granting that things may exceed “any human experience” for “purely factual” reasons (§48, 93). References are to Husserl, Ideas. ↑

17. Oxford Latin Dictionary, ed. P. G. W. Glare, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), s.v. “legō²,” 1116, whose senses run from “To gather (by picking up, plucking, etc.)” through “To pick out (sounds, sights)” and “To choose, select, pick” to “To read, peruse”; s.v. “intellegō” [inter- + legō²], 1029: “To grasp mentally, understand, realize.” ↑

18. Ivan Illich, “Guarding the Eye in the Age of Show,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, no. 28 (Autumn 1995): 51: “Since the sixteenth century, the gaze seems incapable of neglecting the image. Etymologically, to ‘neg-lect’ means to ‘not read.’ For several centuries now, our eyes have ceased to be windows through which the world comes to us. We read what light paints on the retina.” The paper was first given in Hamburg on 19 January 1993 (47, unnumbered note). ↑

19. Ivan Illich, In the Vineyard of the Text: A Commentary to Hugh’s Didascalicon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). ↑

20. Husserl, Crisis, §40, 149: “The manifold acquisitions of earlier active life are not dead sediments; even the background (for example, that of the perceptual field), of which we are always concurrently conscious but which is momentarily irrelevant and remains completely unnoticed, still functions according to its implicit validities.” The active ego can return to this horizon, “reactivating old acquisitions” (149). Implicit in this conception of perceptual transformation is repetition (relegere, in the terms I set out above), on the one hand, and memory, on the other. Memory, in this context, is the means by which the repetition becomes cumulative and transformative. Memory can thus be read to imply a future-oriented formation that goes beyond past-oriented storage retrieval in an unchanging subject. Practice is the act of leveraging memory-formation in the direction of a specific version of the person you want to become. In that sense, memory is just as much about the future as it is about the past. Practice and memory go hand in hand in the cultivation of the person, reshaping perception in the process. The ascetic formation of perception is thus an inherently temporal activity; its temporal structure is what lets the same practice, engaged in correctly and over time, change the abilities and disposition of the practitioner. ↑

21. Cicero, The Nature of the Gods 2.72, trans. P. G. Walsh (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 73: “those who scrupulously rehearsed and so to say studied afresh all the ritual involved in divine worship were called religious (religiosi), a word which derives from the verb to review (relegere)—just as elegant people are so called because they make choices (elegantes ex eligendo), diligent people because they are attentive (ex diligendo diligentes), and intelligent people because of their understanding (ex intellegendo intellegentes). All these words contain the same force of ‘choosing’ which is present in the adjective ‘religious.’” ↑

22. OLD, s.v. “dīligō¹” [dis- + legō²], 597: “To love, hold dear,” and, in a milder sense, “To have an especial regard or liking for (persons or things).” Michiel de Vaan, Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the Other Italic Languages (Leiden: Brill, 2008), s.v. “legō”: “As for dīligere, I see no semantic need to connect it with any other verb than legō ‘to collect’” (333). On his account, *disligere “to pick out” became “love” (333). ↑

23. Hugh of St. Victor, The Didascalicon of Hugh of St. Victor: A Medieval Guide to the Arts, trans. Jerome Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961). ↑

24. Plato, Republic 518d–e, trans. G. M. A. Grube, rev. C. D. C. Reeve, in Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 1136. ↑