Still from Gesaffelstein’s video clip for their song “Hard Dreams.” Dir. J. Hemingway/Division, J. de Chateleux, 2024
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Introduction
3. Reflection and its Limits: A Historical Sketch
5. Conclusion: Refraction and Thinking as a Field of Action
The essay below has been published in four installments; this, the fourth and final one, contains section 5.
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5. Conclusion: Refraction and Thinking as a Field of Action
Let’s now return to the three questions I posed at the beginning of section 2:
(1) If TTS and poststructuralist thought conclude that we cannot reflect beyond our preconceptions or biases, then how is free thinking possible?
(2) Is reflection in that case not just confirmation bias in action since the same thoughts and notions are utilized repeatedly throughout successive reflective processes?
(3) If we consider points (1) and (2), then how can thought-shapers be generative? Or, how can philosophy be creative? Is an “escape from thinking by thinking” possible? Or, put more succinctly: is changing your mind possible?
To reflect is gradually to transform the contents of a mental process through evaluation and comparison, if we follow Kant’s account. As TTS and an established body of cognitive science demonstrate, our pathways of thinking run largely through the same rivulets. This feature provides cognitive stability but has a constrictive drawback: it traps thinking in repetitive patterns—the reflective mirror palace. We would underestimate thought-shaping if we clung to the theory that perception results in a veridical “image in the head.” While reflection has an important transformative potential, it also runs the risk of staying trapped within a frame of reference that is invisibly erected around and underneath it:
[R]eflective intellect is intrinsically narrow. And so reflection is, in truth, a special instance of refraction. It sees otherness only by impoverishing it through the medium of itself, which is to say, by a species of refraction. As a “mirror of nature” it conceals the transformations it performs behind the mask of its one (unconscious) achievement: the true representation of the intellect. (Mullarkey, 2004: p. 487)
Refraction, however, represents the moment that the customary frame of thought splits and unfurls, breaking the horizons of the field of thinking. It is through an “epistemic break” (once more: breking) that one re-orients one’s thinking, thereby changing the entire field of perception (Bachelard, 2002). In familiar language: refraction is found in breakthroughs, the appreciation of nature, self-discovery, eureka moments, existential crises, religious or spiritual experiences, and in the everyday appreciation of sunsets, the first snow falling, or fern leaves unfolding; in being transported by art; in moments of deep grief and rejoicing ecstasy. In these moments, what is known or what is experienced is not forgotten—it is transfigured and appears against a different background.
Here lies the answer to what we may realistically expect from reflective thought: it cannot be used to ascend an ontological ladder, for the representation of the ladder is itself a thought-shaper, albeit a useful one. We require refraction not to escape, but to re-orient the entire field of thinking. Compare this idea with the postmodern notion that we are forever condemned to map out different positions, without ever arriving at a unitary perspective or truth. Wouldn’t it be better to refract and open our thinking rather than to fragment it? If we do so, we should also reconsider our customary view of what it means to know:
Knowledge is not given to us in a sudden illumination of the mind; to know is to strive, to work. We learn that this chipped stone can serve to cut and to chop; that stone, blunted, can serve to grind. […] Once we see what we can do with a broken branch, a chipped stone, a bone or steel knife, we figure out what falling rocks, streaming water, and the roots of trees do by themselves. (Lingis, 2018: p. 448)
Knowledge and practice (as Gadamer also noted) are intimately correlated. To acquire knowledge is to probe the world, as Hegel implied when he invoked the gap between concept and reality. Reality is worked out and probed by concepts—it is not just intellectually received. Through usage, chipped stones become rudimentary knives; and in turn, one learns to see which stone makes a suitable knife. As in the example of the bent oar in water, perception overlays itself on reality, transfiguring the latter in a field of action and thought alike. But this implies creative practice: the capacity to willingly work on changing one’s mind, assuming an authorial relationship to it, and engaging in “seeing-as” (Wittgenstein, 1953/2009: pp. 210–212).
We need not deny that thought-shapers, biases, ideology, prejudices, and rigidity influence our thinking. We require an attitudinal change towards them so that we can effectively operate in their presence—we must assume their pre-structuring as an integral part of thinking (Gadamer, 2013: pp. 289–290). This means that we must get used to refractively reorienting our thinking. Familiar objects, notions and ideas (like oars or chipped stones) acquire new hues or affects when viewed from a different angle—we see them as something different from what they are presently. The mirror palace of reflection only becomes dangerous when it forces our thinking in identical pathways, flattening out and freezing the richness and unfolding novelty of experience, or obfuscating the presence of novelty in favor of sameness.
Productively to refract one’s thought, one requires no confirmation of what one already knows or has experienced. The only requirement is to view the familiar in a different light—any light at all. The crucial step in changing one’s mind is to situate oneself and the object of attention within a broader perceptual field or genealogy of thinking. At this stage, there is no need to let go of opinions or convictions. What is needed is a resituating of them. In Bergson’s terms: we never have the same experience, but we usually fail to notice this. For instance, the daily walk from our house to the office appears identical to us. Once we pay attention to each event as a singular instance, instead of being an identical copy of a former experience, we expose the familiar to new interpretations. Just as the Socratic question refracts what was commonly assumed, so too does refraction cause the opening of the past, the present and the future.
In turn, this allows for different engagements. As we do not lose our previous experiences while doing so, the new overlays on the familiar as a refractive layer. In turn, this changes how we perceive the present, future, and past. When Bergson speaks of experience as becoming, he meant to indicate that this process is continuous, but most of the time we are unaware of it. The classical theological notion of the nunc instantis represents the moment of exception: through an intense experience, it transforms the boundaries of appearance (Nowotny, 2002: p. 152). In such apprehensive events, experience experiences itself in such a way that it creates a rift within itself—its relativity becomes fully apparent to itself. But instead of being terrifying, this experience is actually liberating.
Experience is continuous, as is interpretation. In Hegelian terms: the concepts we use to interpret reality are always different from that reality, resulting in a gap that is constitutive of our cognition. Once we apply that insight to perceptual experiences instead of concepts, we see that even perception is liable to reformation. Indeed, Gadamer’s entire hermeneutical project would not be possible without this option. Hermeneutics assumes a continuity between past and present in such a way that one can engage with it on productive terms, by shaping one’s identity or one’s relation to the world. This requires a change in perception, effectuated by interpreting and engaging the past. The rift in experience is needed to situate oneself properly, but also to escape the reflective mirror palace. The experience that becomes an object to itself does not become an object in the same way that everyday items are. Liberated in the nunc instantis, it appears as freedom, yet not as unconstrained.
To be free means to change the conditions for thinking once one experiences their limitations. The limitations themselves never disappear completely but are relativized and seen for what they are through a perspectival shift. To “move” through the field of thinking is not to attain access to a new Platonic ideal of knowledge, disembodied from our embeddedness in the biosphere. Instead, while we should not aim to grasp reality as a totality, the possibility to deepen and enrich our understanding, to weave a “web of meaning” and to uncover new relationships between the elements of our perception through a process of refractive shifts and transfigurations is fully within our grasp. There is no need for relativist nihilism here—only for epistemic humility and the embrace of freedom.
All this does not imply that there are no biases anymore, or that thought-shaping is not effective anymore. Instead, the task is to once more deepen our experience. In a different context, Hanna and I have called this the practice of creative piety (Hanna and Paans, 2022).
Practicing creative piety involves taking a critical, refractive standpoint on a determinate domain of content, characterized by four features:
1. It is higher-dimensional or higher-order—for example, generating a “transcendental” third-dimensional point of view out of an array or spreadsheet of that content that’s otherwise merely “flat” or two-dimensional. So, it does not ascend an ontological ladder, but makes tangible what was already immanent in a given domain.
2. It is synoptic with respect to that entire determinate domain of content—for example, seeing a landscape as an integral, dynamic three-dimensional contour map from the vantage point of an airplane flying over it, allowing one to creatively work out relationships within it.
3. It is fully critical cognizant of the inherent boundaries or limits of that determinate domain of content, integrating the awareness of limits (and therefore of a local relativism) within the reasoning and exploration of a given domain of content.
4. It provides direct cognitive access to a new, inexhaustible, and essentially richer—in structural and informational terms alike—domain of content over and above the “old” content available in the “flat” or two-dimensional determinate domain of content.
Point 4. merits some explanation in the light of what has been said above. Refraction renders perceptibly tangible what inheres in reality. Through perception, it overlays a new cognitive order on an existing one, establishing new relationships between them. This relationship is anti-reductionist. The relation between molecules and atoms is one of reduction or a compound structure in terms of basic building blocks. Refraction, on the other hand enriches and expands both cognitive orders by establishing new relationships between them that were nevertheless inherent in them. That this process never results in full closure is an advantage: as Burke already recognized, imagination requires openness as its prime driver (Burke, 2015: 49–50). And as Hegel also realized and Bergson worked out in detail, perception is becoming, thriving on difference. Yet, conceptualization thrives on categorization. In the gap between concept and reality, refraction operates. Through this process, the entire field of thinking is deepened and reconstituted. If constrictive thought-shaping is involved, such refraction is undermined. The refractive element implies fluidity, cognitive flexibility and a certain navigational skill, as well as the willingness to immerse oneself in the process. Constrictive thought-shaping demands that thinking remains mono-perspectival, setting up an impenetrable mirror palace of the mind. Hegel’s and Bergson’s point has been more recently taken up by Lingis, showing how such mono-perspectivism may be prevented:
Yet when we set out to grasp things in rigorous and lucid concepts, we find those very concepts engendering images that are not images of their referents. Allusions, equivocations, evocations, evasions, insinuations refract off their crystal shapes and bewitch the very mind that cut those shapes. (Lingis, 2018: p. 72)
That each refraction leads to a partial viewpoint is a given—the very images engendered by the concept do not match reality. As in the case of the bent oar in water, an oblique viewpoint inserts itself, merging disparate realms of perception. But it does not warrant a relapse into fatalistic relativism. Such (poststructuralist) relativism is the consequence of fragmentation in thinking. Contrariwise, refraction leads to the creative reconstruction and shaping of thought in increasingly complex, adaptive, and rich constellations. It opens up and destabilizes the familiar in favor of enriching it. The “bewitching” feature is the constant eruption of differences that drive experience, which is continuously confronted with novelty. As defined in element 3., creative piety inherently recognizes boundaries or limits, and therefore it can move well beyond what any individual well-constructed logico-mathematical system can describe, define, or refer to. Any form of perspective-taking implies a boundary or limit. Each individual perspective itself is valuable only insofar as the person taking it is self-consciously aware of the limits that essentially circumscribe and constrain it. It’s characteristic of creative piety to embrace and work constructively with these boundaries or limits, and to regularly ‘switch perspectives’ whenever one encounters them, as opposed to falling into logical or non-logical vicious circles, vicious feedback loops, and vicious regresses.
Just as a photographer might adopt various positions towards the object she attempts to photograph, or just as the architect might walk around a building in real life or in his imagination, so too can the mind posit and (genealogically) situate the objects which it explores. It poses them, not as obstacles, but as essentially rich and layered structures or manifolds. There is no need to ascend or descend an ontological ladder—merely to work out, deepen, enrich and survey what appears right before one’s senses. Once this skill is diligently practiced, a degree of genuine free thinking is obtained, not unconstrained, but able to refractively engage with what it encounters in the world.
As regards thought-shaping, this possibility represents a tremendous freedom. Not only can one acquire a deepened understanding of the subject matter (in this example, the object to be photographed or the building), but likewise the possibility to create new thought-shapers that cement new ways of understanding or comprehending. Indeed, what we see in the education of many craft practitioners is exactly this: they are trained to view the world differently, and often through the lens of their craft. The specialized bricklayer can appreciate intricate brickwork; the engineer might be inspired by nature to try out new building constructions. In such cases, the perception that regards the world is shaped to perform a specific task. But no one says that this process cannot be ingrained in one’s way of dealing with a variety of experiences. Indeed, merely to reflect is to accept the playing field of one’s thinking as given; but through refraction, one can break through this habit, forcing an opening where there wasn’t one.
By performing many overlayered perspectival shifts, one creates a “thick” representation. Such representations are structurally complex and semantically rich, and—due to their “layering”—refractively generate new perspectives and ideas. This explains also why we can perceive a metaphysically profound, sublime, existential-mystical quality in the everyday: our representations of it can become suffused with structural complexity, semantic richness, and inherent boundaries and limits that are organically fused with a higher-dimensional, transcendental standpoint. Very often, we perform such meta-cognitive perspectival refractions pre-reflectively and unself-consciously. Feelings like awe, wonder, and respect also originate in these refractive performances, vividly expressing an attitude of creative piety through freedom.
In a philosophical landscape that is (at least in the West) torn between the uncomfortable relativism inherited from poststructuralism and the equally uncomfortable scientism inherited from post-Analytic philosophy, as well as “culture wars” and “fake news” alongside the rise of AI, a new skillset for thinking is required. Partially, the examination of such a skill set falls within the purview of cognitive science, but it falls also to philosophy to invent new modes of thinking. Is it possible to develop the opposite of biases? That is, can we invent practices that open our minds, instead of just examining ways in which our thinking slides back into comfortable reflective thought? Are there practices that stimulate, support, sustain, and further develop the refractive element in thinking? Can we invent and validate modes of thought that are expansive and integrative, avoiding the “reflective mirror palace” in favor of venturing out into a new experiential territory?
One cannot deal with the complexities of the present without engaging the past. Likewise, one cannot assume the infallibility of the past once the context of application changes. What is required is the skill actively to refract—instead of fragmenting—the field of thinking. Doing so, one creates new and overlapping frames of reference as well as non-conceptual and conceptual connections, all of which are umbilically linked to a full acceptance of our limitations, without sliding back into universal relativism, narrow scientism or dogmatic historicism. This means that one must practice traversing the field of thought, creatively transforming it while exploring what it has to offer. To instil this skill is a near-future task of philosophy, and one that brings with it the promise inherent in refraction—genuine liberation in thinking.
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