The Dialectics of Human Perception

“Perception alters vision”, says my brother Saravanan. And so it does…

But what exactly are the ramifications of such an alteration must be the focus of all students of human nature. That there should be such an alteration is inevitable upon the movement of civilization and living.

How does this alteration happen? What are the conditions leading up to this alteration? What are the factors that illuminate or darken the effects of such an alteration?

The order of things in this world now exists as a result of their formation. The sheer physicality of nature is supposedly predictable, in increasing intensity and width, with the growth of species. And while such physical dynamics seeks rightful claims for study, it is not my bone of contention at this moment.

It is the sum total of human perceptive vision and its implications that I seek to explain (or even explain away).

With the growth in the number of the human species, the physical nature of the world was altered in order to create the inexorable, complex, enveloping whole termed easily as “human nature”. This human nature changed and re-formed itself with increasing interaction between members as well as that between members with physical nature. I do realize that my above two sentences stop just short of a dangerous reductionism, for what I have briefed in two sentences is, indeed, “the story of civilization”, to use Will Durant’s popular conception. However, despite a temptation, the story of civilization is neither my focus nor my academic wishful ness at this juncture.

Thus the interaction influenced the core called human nature. And as the habitation area increased, this complex called “human nature”, itself influenced and determined the movement and the growth of such civilization. And then were formed the villages, towns, cities and nation-states. This would be the macrocosmic canopy into which the microcosmic individual phenomenology enters.

At the microcosmic level, the individual is born into an existing complex (nature or culture, in simple terms). The growth of the individual and his forays into the social world are determined by the existing patterns that the inherent nature, or culture, provides. And the fluctuations or conflicts arise out of differences of evaluation of the culture complex.

The individual disorientation with the normative patterns of the cultural complex produces conflicts. Differing individual perceptions also produce conflicts. Nonetheless, the differences explicate the growth of civilization and the complexity of the human mind incorporating the whole ontology and the phylogeny divergence. Such differences in fact engender the growth of the social complex which in turn influences the movement of civilization.
Every human perception is actually an interpretation of the existing social complex and an evaluation of the individual experiences with both the social as well as the physical world. (I am not trying to bring in the whole Kantian discourse, for that would need an attendant set of explanations which might digress the path of this essay. Kantian discourse by itself requires a devoted study, understanding and explanation which make it a field of focus too large for the purview of this essay).
Every evaluation and the preceding interpretation determine the individuals’ outlook on life in general and their own lives in particular. This outlook on life provides the canvas for further evaluations and interpretations of the experiences that are to come.

And so on goes the dialectic.

This, in my opinion, is the ultimate reason and explanation of all perceivable things, order of things, the movement of such an order and the orientational dynamics of these movements.

Let me summarize the dialectic then: physical elements are formed; humanity thrives on these physical elements and these interactions lead to the formation of a social complex; such a social complex comes to assume a pervasive identity by itself (with variations across space, time and distance); the identity then influences and shapes the social complex of the progeny; the progeny interpret their own personal experiences in terms of their evaluation of the imposed, inhering social whole as well the changes they wish to see in them. And such experiences pave the way for future experiences. This is the cycle of the dialectical movement of history, the most relatively absolute (the closest I can come to “absolute”) explanation of the order of things, first and final causes, origins, purposes and effects of the existence of such an order. The order keeps changing, keeps shifting, incorporating elements that are new, altered or the old remolded into the current dimensions of space, time, distance and mind.

Despite these minor aberrations or fluctuations, the underlying canopy remains stable and so do the dynamics and the process. The inevitability of the movement can never be over-emphasized.

(And in my opinion, this movement is not a single, huge circle or ellipse or a straight line, as differing schools like evolutionists, functionalists or evangelists have claimed.
It is like a solenoid --- spring-like movement, consisting of circles of change moving forward across time, distance, mind, self and society!! )