Читать книгу The Elegance of the Hedgehog - Muriel Barbery - Страница 19

Which brings us to the second question: What do we know of the world?

Idealists such as Kant have an answer to this question.

What do they answer?

They answer: not a great deal.

Transcendental idealism holds that we can know only that which appears to our consciousness, that semi-divine entity that rescues us from our animal self. What we know of the world is what our consciousness can say about it because of what it has perceived – and nothing else.

Let us take an example, at random, a sweet cat by the name of Leo. Why? Because I find it easier with a cat. And let me ask you: how can you be certain that it really is a cat and likewise, how can you even know what a cat is? A sound reply would consist in emphasising the fact that your perception of the animal, complemented by a few conceptual and linguistic mechanisms, has enabled you to constitute your knowledge. But the response of the transcendental idealist would be to illustrate how impossible it is to know whether what we perceive and conceive of as a cat – if that which appears to our consciousness as a cat – is actually true to what the cat is in its deepest being. It may well be that my cat – at present I perceive him as an obese quadruped with quivering whiskers and I have filed him away in my mind in a drawer labelled ‘cat’ – is in actual fact, and in his very essence, a blob of green sticky stuff that does not meow. My senses, however, have been fashioned in such a way that this is not apparent to me, and the revolting blob of green sticky stuff, deceiving both my disgust and my earnest trust, is masquerading before my consciousness beneath the appearance of a silky and gluttonous house pet.

So much for Kantian idealism. What we know of the world is only the idea that our consciousness forms of it. But there is an even more depressing theory than that one, a theory that offers a prospect even more terrifying than that of innocently caressing a lump of green slime or dropping our toast every morning into a pustular abyss we had mistaken for a toaster.

There is the idealism of Edmund Husserl, which as far as I’m concerned now signifies designer-label homespun cowls for wayward monks sidetracked by some obscure schism in the Baptist Church.

According to Husserl’s theory, all that exists is the perception of the cat. And the cat itself? Well, we can just do without it. Bye-bye kitty. Who needs a cat? What cat? Henceforth, philosophy will claim the right to wallow exclusively in the wickedness of pure mind. The world is an inaccessible reality and any effort to try to know it is futile. What do we know of the world? Nothing. As all knowledge is merely reflective consciousness exploring its own self, the world, therefore, can merrily go to the devil.

This is phenomenology: the ‘science of that which appears to our consciousness’. How does a phenomenologist spend his day? He gets up, fully conscious as he takes his shower that he is merely soaping a body whose existence has no foundation, then he wolfs down a few slices of toast and jam that have been nihilised, puts on some clothes that are the equivalent of an empty set of parentheses, heads for his office and then snatches up a cat.

It matters little to our phenomenologist whether the cat exists or does not exist or even what the cat is in its very essence. The indemonstrable does not interest him. What cannot be denied, however, is that a cat appeared to his consciousness, and it is this act of appearing that is of concern to our good fellow.

And what is more, an act of appearing that is quite complex. The fact that one can explain, in detail, the way in which one’s consciousness perceives a thing whose very existence is a matter of indifference is simply extraordinary. Did you know that our consciousness does not perceive things straight off but performs a complicated series of operations of synthesis which, by means of successive profiling, introduce to our senses objects as diverse as, for example, a cat, a broom or a fly swatter – and, God knows, isn’t that useful? Have you ever wondered why it is that you can observe your cat and know at the same time what he looks like from the front, behind, above and below – even though at the present moment you are perceiving him only from the front? It must be that your consciousness, without your even realising it, has been synthesising multiple perceptions of your cat from every possible angle, and has ended up creating this integral image of the cat that your sight, at that moment, could never give you. And the same is true for the fly swatter, which you will only ever perceive from one direction even though you can visualise it in its entirety in your mind and, oh miracle, you know perfectly well without even turning it over how it is made on the other side.

You will agree that such knowledge is quite useful. We can’t imagine Manuela using a fly swatter without immediately rallying the knowledge that she has of the various stages of profiling necessary to her perception. Moreover, you can’t imagine Manuela using a fly swatter for the simple reason that there are never any flies in rich people’s apartments. Neither flies, nor pox, nor bad smells, nor family secrets. In rich people’s apartments everything is clean, smooth, healthy and consequently safe from the tyranny of fly swatters and public opprobrium.

But enough of phenomenology: it is nothing more than the solitary, endless monologue of consciousness, a hardcore autism that no real cat would ever importune.