The photographic is the illusion of depth. Depth conveys to any image the illusion of the real. Depth extends into motion, which are both ultimately conventions that retain their respective dynamics through the simple positioning of body (or image of body) within the more global image we call the world. If this triad, depth, motion, and body, is composed of illusions, why do we not experience these illusions as illusory in our daily lives? This is because perception cannot question itself.
If perception cannot question itself, and question ourselves we definitely do, wherefrom the questioning?
The best and most reliant method to know somebody else’s intention is to ask that person what his/her intention was for doing the deed committed. This seems to imply that to know we have to be told. Should this same formula be applied to the obverse side of human cognition – do i need to be told what my intentions are?
I go out walking along the promenade. I arrive back home after the walk and while sipping tea the question questions: why did you just go out walking along the promenade? I could retort by saying that I was bored at home, and that the sea looks beautiful while walking, and that that beauty gives a sense of pleasure, which ultimately results in me feeling a sense of floating while walking along the promenade. And hence the reason why I went out walking: I wanted to float! But the sense of floating was the end result of a long causal process, clearly not the intention for you going out walking. Well, I could say then that I went out walking because I was bored at home. Indeed, but that is what seemingly propelled the causal process leading to you eventually experiencing a sense of floating. Clearly, going out walking because you were bored at home is not an intention, let alone your intention for going out walking.
When we question our intentions, the intention to question our intentions must be to get closer to some truth… or at least to something or someone. If intentionality, stupidly and commonly confounded with will, is successfully invalidated, the principle promoting the notion of intentionality as “to stretch toward” remains absolutely valid. The “I intend” is know witnessed as being merely a convention.
Fuck the bible and let us write anew the story of Adam and Eve. In the extant book of Genesis, we are told that God invited Adam to name all creatures He had created, this before the advent of his companion, Eve (see Genesis 2:18-23). So Adam could speak before the coming of his consort. But he felt lonely as he had created none of those creatures he had so lovingly named. This is when Project Eve germinated in his mind. But, alas, she was never created. And he, through his own fault and no one else’s, ate from the tree of knowledge, partook in all kinds of perversions, got kicked out of Eden, and then merrily started his search for Eve. Thus the ability to question is not an ability that is reliant on a being that happens to be linguistic. If perception cannot question itself, cannot itself question, it must be memory which causes language to be articulated in such a manner for that same language to be consciously perceived as a questioning. Here come Christ and (His archenemy from time immemorial) Satan and their forty-day escapade in the Judaean Desert.
Memory invariably puts into question whatever it is that perception registers.
Remember – that is the command of the intention, any intention! Perception cannot question itself and thus cannot understand itself. And memory is a boat without a rudder. St. Augustine says:
“When we speak something true, that is, something we know, […] it is necessary that from the knowledge which we hold in memory there be born a word which is absolutely of the same sort as the knowledge from which it is born. The thought formed by that which we know is a word which we speak in our heart” (TESKE 2003: 157)
and then…
“for without memory the gaze of our thought has no object to return to, and without love it has no reason to return to it” (Ibid.).
One has to be told to remember in order for one to start seeking to remember.
Memory eventually always treats its subject as having happened in the past. If memory always treats its subject in the past tense, the act of remembering, that is, the act of actuating in the present, in the mind, events that have already happened or are very likely to happen (and hence to all intents and purposes past), is a redundant act simply because what is to be remembered, now that it has been remembered, is now evidently outside of memory. Memory and its act, remembering, are merely linguistic conventions, affected through, and being, a process. The words memory and remembering effectively mislead one into thinking that these two must be neurologically determined. Words mislead.
(Good to note at this point that conceiving the remembered outside of memory is yet another linguistic convention.)
The photographic is thus what we see with our eyes.
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References:
TESKE, Roland. 2003. ‘Augustine’s philosophy of memory’. In Eleonore Stump & Norman Kretzmann (eds.). The Cambridge Companion to Augustine. United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 148-158.
