A.E. Robbert
In this essay, I argue that the classical philosophical tradition of askēsis and the contemporary literature on perceptual learning converge on a structurally similar insight; namely, that perception is constitutively open to formation, and that what becomes available to awareness depends in part on the training of the perceiver.
Drawing on Pierre Hadot’s account of spiritual exercises and Eric Perl’s reading of Platonic form, I develop an account of perceptual adequacy grounded in participation, which I define here as the event in which a thing’s intelligible identity is disclosed in the meeting of its form’s givenness and the perceiver’s cultivated receptivity. On this account, the perceiver does not construct what he or she sees but must be formed into the kind of being to whom the intelligible character of things becomes present.
I then place this philosophical framework alongside the ecological psychology of James and Eleanor Gibson and the related research on perceptual learning, showing that these contemporary accounts arrive independently at a compatible description of the same phenomenon. I argue, however, that the convergence also exposes a limitation in the research literature, even as it adds empirical justification.
My view is that without an account of form, contemporary research can establish that expert perception is more differentiated than novice perception but cannot ground the normative claim that it is more adequate in a philosophically robust sense. The classical account, I suggest, offers this missing sense through an account of alētheia, truth understood not as propositional correspondence but as the disclosure of a thing’s intelligible identity to a prepared awareness, and, with it, an understanding of perception that exceeds skilled or functional responsiveness alone.
I will conclude by noting that the fullest expression of perceptual formation is not practical mastery but theōria, the receptive beholding of intrinsic significance, and that askēsis is ultimately ordered to this contemplative end.
I. Preparing Perception
What comes to presence for us as perceivers is downstream of our practices of attending.
Across my various research projects, I have argued that perception should not be understood as the passive reception of a pre-given world but as an achievement, one shaped by practice, and therefore by the kind of person the practitioner has become through that practice. The central term in this argument is askēsis, understood in the classical sense argued for by Pierre Hadot, referring to the constellation of exercises—intellectual, moral, aesthetic, and contemplative—by which the person is formed and reformed in the direction of a deeper and more adequate relation to reality.
The mediating term between these exercises and the perceptual changes I am describing is attention (prosochē), which the various strands of this tradition understood not as a mere narrowing of focus but as a sustained and cultivated orientation of awareness. To look at a few examples, in Plato’s Symposium, Socrates is described as having “turned his attention to his own intellect” (prosechanta ton noun), a paradigmatic instance of the kind of deliberate reorientation of perception that askēsis enables. For Plotinus, such reorientation is possible because the soul occupies a median position among sensible and intelligible things alike, one capable of turning upward toward intellect (nous), downward toward discursive reasoning, or outward toward sense. Attention, on the Plotinian view, determines which orientation is active, and askēsis is the discipline by which the practitioner gains facility in sustaining these orientations, which, as Plotinus observed, may “fatigue” the thinker without the necessary training. In part inspired by Plotinus, Henri Bergson identified philosophy itself with a “conversion of attention,” a displacement of awareness from practical urgency toward a perception of things as they are in themselves. It is this identification that led Hadot to describe the essential contribution of Bergsonism as “the idea of philosophy as transformation of perception.”
Askēsis, on this account, underwrites the capacity for attention, and attention in turn guides and transforms what perception can receive. Along these lines, we can point to a range of practices ordered to this end, including vigilance toward intrusive thoughts (logismoi), in which the practitioner learns to observe and redirect the movements of the mind as they arise; the cultivation of inner stillness (hesychia), which clears the interior space within which sustained attention becomes possible; and disciplines of simplification and renunciation—such as fasting, withdrawal, or solitude—which reduce the influence of what may compete for the soul’s attentive capacity. These practices are not themselves contemplation, but they prepare and deepen our capacity for it. What remains to be shown is what such cultivated attention is ultimately receptive of, and here the question of form becomes unavoidable, as we’ll see.
Perception, on this view, is indexed to the skills and habits of the perceiver, not in the sense that the perceiver constructs or projects what he or she sees, but in the sense that the perceiver must be formed into the kind of being to whom the intelligible character of a thing can present itself. What I have wanted to show is that askēsis, so understood, is neither a preparation for philosophical insight nor a supplement to it, but the medium through which such illumination is achieved. In this sense, the practices of self-transformation that the philosophical tradition offers us alter what comes to presence for the practitioner as intelligible, and thus bear directly on the practitioner’s relation to reality itself. However, what is at stake in this formation, as I want to argue in this piece, is not merely a change in responsiveness, but a change in perceptual adequacy—a deepening of the perceiver’s capacity to receive reality.
To pursue that claim, the purpose of this essay is comparative. I want to place this philosophical account of askēsis alongside a body of contemporary work drawn from the literature on perceptual learning and affordances. To be clear, my claim is not that the classical philosophical account stands in need of empirical verification, nor that the cognitive-scientific account secretly depends on Platonic metaphysics in order to do its work. It is rather that a structurally similar insight emerges in both fields independently. That insight is that perception is trainable; that what becomes available to awareness depends in part on the formation of the perceiver; and that such formation yields a more adequate grasp of what is there to be seen. But this convergence, I will argue, also exposes a question the contemporary accounts do not principally set out to answer: What does it mean for perception to become more “adequate”? And to what, if anything, is such formation ordered toward beyond increasingly skillful responsiveness?
If perceptual formation is to count as an increase in adequacy, in some higher sense, rather than merely a difference in response, then we need some account of what perception becomes adequate to. It is here that the philosophical question of form returns, not as a rival to contemporary accounts, but as an ontological interpretation of the structured intelligibility to which they point, and as the ground of the normative claim they gesture toward but cannot secure on their own. It is also here that Eric Perl’s reading of Plato is essential, especially insofar as Perl reinterprets the common two-world reading of Plato that besets our reception of his work.
II. Askēsis and Alētheia
Truth on this account is not a property of our statements alone but an event that emerges in perception through practices of presencing.
If askēsis cultivates attention, and attention guides perception, then the question that remains is what such perception is ultimately receptive of. It is this question that Perl’s reading of Plato addresses. The philosophical account of form that underwrites my argument is drawn primarily from this interpretation, but I want to say something about what Perl is pushing against before turning to what his reading makes available.
The dominant reception of Plato in much modern philosophy has tended to read form as something radically separate from the sensible world, as a transcendent object toward which the mind reaches, and to which the body stands as an obstacle. On this reading, the body and its perceptions are seen as impediments to philosophical understanding, and askēsis functions primarily as a discipline of negation, a turning away from the sensible in order to gain access to what is purely intelligible—to “form” as it is commonly understood. What is troubling about this picture is that it makes the cultivation of perception, at the level of physiological sensation, philosophically irrelevant, if not actively harmful to philosophical speculation. The story goes that if form is simply elsewhere, no refinement of perceptual attunement can bring us closer to it and may in fact draw us away from it. My argument suggests we should reject this picture, and it is Perl’s reading that gave me the philosophical resources to do so.
For Perl, form, or eidos—the word carries the sense of “look” or “visible aspect”—is the intelligible identity through which a thing shows itself as what it is. It is not a mental image, not a concept projected by the perceiver onto neutral matter, and not an abstract universal hovering above the particular. It is, rather, the condition generative of things as they appear as what they are, the “appearance” through which a thing presents itself to a perceiver and makes it recognizable and distinguishable. I read Perl as saying that this is not a weakening of the Platonic commitment to form’s reality but a recovery of what Plato actually meant—that form is the structure of the showing of things, not a further realm beyond it, even if it is also that.
On Perl’s reading of Plato, then, form is real in the sense that it is prior to and independent of any particular perceiver’s grasp of it. The form of a thing is not constituted by the perceiver’s act of attending to it; it is disclosed by that act, in a participatory event in which the form’s intelligibility and the perceiver’s cultivated receptivity are both required, and neither alone is sufficient. Perception, on this account, is not a one-way projection of the mind onto a formless world, nor a passive receipt of data from a fully self-presenting reality. It is a relational event of disclosure, in which what shows itself and the one to whom it shows itself are both constitutively involved. I want to be clear that participation as I am describing it is not a form of constructivism. The form is not produced by the perceiver’s receptivity, nor is its intelligible character a function of the practitioner’s formation. It is rather the case that the form’s showing requires a perceiver formed to receive it. The perceiver’s cultivation is the condition of form’s disclosure, not of its existence.
What Perl’s interpretation opened up for me was the possibility of grounding the whole account of askēsis in a philosophically robust account of perception, one capable of saying something more than that formation leads to behavioral or functional success, though it does also do that. It also offers a particular notion of truth, understood as alētheia (truth as disclosure or unconcealment). This, I want to suggest, is a deeper, or at least more original, sense of truth than truth understood as propositional correspondence, precisely because it accounts for the prior perceptual condition under which correspondence first becomes possible.
For Perl, following Plato, alētheia, then, refers not first to the correctness of a proposition that corresponds to a state of affairs, but to the prior event in which a thing’s intelligible identity becomes present, or comes forward into perception, as what it is. Truth, on this reading, is not primarily something statements have; it is something that happens in perception, a disclosure of form to a prepared awareness, only later expressible in propositions that may or may not correspond to it.
If this is right, then the cultivation of sensible perception through askēsis is neither ancillary nor an obstacle to the philosophical pursuit of truth but is constitutive of it. Philosophy, in this sense, involves more than the production of correct propositional judgments about a state of affairs; it also requires the formation of the kind of person to whom what is can show itself with greater depth and clarity. The field of sensibility thus appears not as an obstacle to philosophical understanding but as an entry point to be refined through practices of perception. Whatever else philosophy may be, it is also the cultivation of receptivity to form’s givenness, first in the immediacy of perception and then in the propositions that such perception makes possible. Askēsis and alētheia, we can say, share an intimate link.
What I want to establish through this reading is that perceptual adequacy has a real interpretative standard. This means that perception can be more or less adequate, more or less fully attuned to what is there to be perceived, irrespective of our local projects and concerns. We might say that there is still a sense of correspondence at work here, but it is a more primary correspondence, one participatory and achieved rather than static and given, co-involving, to use Perl’s words, “the mutual togetherness” of seer and seen. And this is what I mean when I say that askēsis is the medium of philosophical illumination, rather than an adjunct to the more “primary” work of propositional correctness. Why? Because it prepares the perceiver to receive what was always already there to be seen with greater depth and clarity.
It is this account of form and perceptual receptivity that I now want to bring into conversation with the contemporary literature on perceptual learning, not because that literature stands in need of this philosophical account to perform its function of falsifiable description, but because it offers, in a distinct register, an empirically tractable description of the same general phenomenon, that is, the formation of the perceiver as a condition for fuller perceptual disclosure of what is perceived. I will then close by stating what I think is missing from this account.
III. Perceptual Learning
We have a contemporary empirical account that renders legible the link between practice and perception.
The tradition of perceptual learning research that concerns me here has its roots in the ecological psychology of James and Eleanor Gibson. I read the Gibsons as making a philosophical move that runs against the grain of the cognitivist picture in which perception is primarily a process of constructing an internal representation of the world from impoverished sensory data. On their account, what the perceiver picks up is real structure in the environment, not a model of it, and perceptual learning is the progressive attunement of the perceiver to that structure, which was already present before the learner was capable of detecting it. The learner does not construct the structure he or she learns to perceive; it is uncovered through the progressive activity of the perceiver, an activity that in turn yields additional detail, detail salient to the growing skill of the perceiver-in-action.
To refine this point, we might look at Kevin Connolly’s work, where he takes up and subjects this view to sustained philosophical analysis. On Connolly’s account, as I am reading him, the central contribution of this view is to establish perceptual learning as a philosophically distinct epistemic phenomenon, one that is irreducible both to the acquisition of propositional knowledge and to mere associative conditioning. What perceptual learning produces is a genuine modification of perception itself, not a change in what the perceiver believes or knows about what he or she sees, but a change in what he or she sees. The propositional view suggests that what is perceptually available across skill levels is more or less the same, and that what separates the expert from the novice is an additional layer of cognitive processing that interprets this more primary data in a more effective way. The perceptual learning view, by contrast, suggests that training and expertise reside in the more primary layer of perception itself. What the expert perceives is genuinely different from what the novice has available—the field of appearances has shifted through the practice.
If this view is right, then perceptual transformation is genuinely epistemic, though not necessarily propositional. The trained radiologist, the experienced wine taster, and the skilled draftsman do not simply know more facts about their respective domains than novices do. These persons literally perceive differently. What comes to presence for the expert is a more differentiated and structured whole, a configuration with a recognizable identity, while the novice encounters a less-differentiated field. In this sense we find a modern description of the older philosophical claim that training alters not only what one does with perception, but what perception itself can receive.
What I take to matter most here is that this literature gives contemporary expression to the older insight I began with—that perception is itself shapeable, that the perceiver must be formed, and that such formation yields a genuine increase in adequacy rather than simply a difference in response. In phenomenological terms, what we are training when we train perception is our capacity for intentionality, the inherent “aboutness” or “directedness” of perceptual awareness, which issues forth in a pre-reflective and synthetic way in our moment-to-moment encounter with the world as we engage it. What askēsis and perceptual learning both suggest is that training alters what one can discriminate and, more deeply, what shows up as salient within a lived world in the first place. Thus, for the expert, different affordances stand forth. New possibilities emerge. The world appears differently. Intentionality is itself skill-inflected; intentionality is always skilled intentionality.
I would want to say, in a vocabulary closer to the classical tradition, that these contemporary accounts describe how a formed perceiver finds himself or herself addressed by a formed world. Practice does not fabricate that structure, but educates our receptivity to it, altering what can come to presence as significant, relevant, or real in our first-personal awareness. What Hadot describes as spiritual exercise, and what I have been describing as the cultivation of receptivity through askēsis, reappears here as the disciplined transformation of perceptual capacities through training. The vocabulary and disciplinary focus may differ, but the structural parallel between the two is evident. In both cases, perceptual achievement depends on the formation of the perceiver into someone capable of receiving a more articulate sense of what is there to be perceived in the arena of our seeing and doing.
IV. Beyond Responsiveness
What perceptual formation is ultimately ordered toward is not practical mastery but theōria, contemplative beholding.
What I want to press further, though, is the question of what it means for practiced perception to become more adequate to what it encounters in the world. What I find in the perceptual learning literature is an empirically tractable account of how perception is trained, of how salience is educated, and of how the perceiver becomes selectively responsive to increasingly fine-grained structures within a given domain. What these accounts do not principally set out to articulate, however, is the sense in which such increased adequacy might extend beyond improved discrimination and more skillful responsiveness into truth as disclosure. This is, on my view, what the classical account can add to the empirical framework. In the language of alētheia, what is at stake in trained perception is a fuller unconcealment of what is there as true, something that exceeds a more successful uptake of environmental structure, aimed at some utilitarian goal or expression of functional fitness (two aspects of perceptual learning we should hold onto, without finding sufficient and complete).
In other words, the contemporary empirical accounts tend to operate with a picture in which perception is understood primarily in relation to action, and in which the adequacy of perception is measured by the quality of the perceiver’s practical responsiveness within a specific domain. The governing concept is something like optimal grip, the state in which the perceiver has achieved maximal fluency of responsiveness to a given situation, usually understood, again, in some functional or evolutionary sense. The consequence is not that such accounts are wrong, but that they leave out a dimension the classical philosophical account identifies as central.
For if the telos of perceptual formation is practical responsiveness, then there is little conceptual space for a mode of perceptual achievement that is receptive rather than operative, little room for what the classical tradition calls theōria—a word whose root sense is “seeing” or “beholding,” and describes a mode of perception ordered not to action but to receptive attention, the reception of what shows itself as intrinsically significant rather than as practically salient. Theōria, in this sense, is the consummation of the attentive capacity that askēsis cultivates. It is the point at which attention, freed from practical urgency, becomes cultivated receptivity to what shows itself as itself without reference to our plans or needs. To absorb disclosure entirely into responsiveness, as these accounts tend to do, is to treat the showing of things chiefly as a prompt for our effective action. What falls from view is alētheia, truth beyond successful uptake and response but as the unconcealment of reality.
And here, I think, a normative issue presses into our inquiry. The perceptual learning literature can establish that expert perception is more differentiated than novice perception, but differentiation alone does not yield adequacy in a robust philosophical sense. I would say, “more differentiated” is a comparative claim about the perceiver’s relative goal capacities; “more adequate” is a claim about the perceiver’s relation to what is really there. The Gibsonian framework gestures toward real structure in the environment, but it tends to leave that structure ontologically thin, functioning as a placeholder for whatever invariants the organism learns to detect through its projects.
There is here a normative and contemplative horizon that the empirical literature does not furnish. Without something like form, understood as the intelligible identity of the thing as it is prior to and independent of the perceiver’s grasp of it, one can say that the expert perceives differently, but what one cannot say, except by appeal to behavioral success, is that the expert perceives better in a normative sense. On my view, what the Platonic account supplies is precisely this missing normative sense. The form of the thing is the standard against which perceptual achievement can be measured as genuinely normative rather than merely functional, and it is the reality toward which the perceiver’s formation is ordered toward as a telos that exceeds the perceiver’s own cognitive economy of wants, needs, or desires.
What I am proposing here does not replace these contemporary accounts, nor does it ask them to become something other than what they are. I want to understand them and put them to use at the level of their own insight but carry that insight into a different register. My sense is that what the classical account of form and alētheia adds is a way of describing what this perceptual education is ultimately an education for— the fuller disclosure of what things are, intrinsically. What I want to suggest, finally, is that theōria should not be understood as a second achievement that follows upon skilled perception, nor an additional layer placed on top of it, but is, in the final analysis, the deeper register of what perceptual formation was always ordered toward.
Thus, if askēsis is the formation of the perceiver’s capacity to receive the form of things, then the fullest expression of that capacity is something more than a refined responsiveness to practical solicitations but a beholding in which what comes to presence is received as intrinsically significant, as something whose self-showing is itself the end. In very simple terms, this mode of perception is aimed at becoming present to a thing’s intrinsic value. The contemporary literature, in its emphasis on responsive differentiation, can only take us part of the way toward this insight.
In contrast, the philosopher who has been formed through askēsis does not simply perceive more than the untrained perceiver; he or she is capable of receiving the disclosure of things as disclosure, the appearing of form as form, and in this reception the event of truth, alētheia, is consummated not as a proposition but as an act of contemplative attention. This is what it means to say that askēsis is ordered to theōria, and that the cultivation of perception is, in the end, a preparation for the beholding of what is, Being in its broadest possible sense.