Drinking Glasses and Oxygen

A further reflection on memory and understanding

There are no facts, only interpretations.
—Friedrich Nietzsche

If you are like most adults living and breathing in the developed world, you love your facts.¹ They are things you can appeal to to settle an argument or to start one, to undermine those you disagree with or support those you do, to resist accepting an account of things you do not like or to accept one you do. Facts are solid things, real things, things out there apart from anyone thinking them or feeling anything about them that well-nigh impose themselves on minds even slightly open to accepting the way things really are. “It is a fact that this is a drinking glass!” one might claim against the notion that the glass as such is not given immediately experience; one might then raise the thing and wave it around for emphasis. “It is obviously a fact that we need oxygen to breath and live!” another might assert in face of the notion that all understanding is interpretation, and thus that there are no facts but only interpretations. Never mind that the modern fact has not always been a fact of life but rather grew out of efforts by merchants to prove their honesty and trustworthiness in a changing economic world; the fact is an integral part of how we now understand the world.²

While it is true that most all of us take the existence of facts for granted, take them as bedrock upon which we can build solid structures of understanding and knowledge that no competing interpretive (hermeneutical) framework could, if entertained, topple, if we attend carefully to conscious experience and what is given in conscious experience, we can see that this is not so, that there are no facts—as Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote—only interpretations. And we can see this by noticing how the understanding of anything given through the conscious perceptual flow of our senses is brought to actual intelligibility, actual understandability, through vast interpretive work done in the light of memory, and this at every moment that we notice something, even something we take as obvious.³

Consider a drinking glass. Any drinking glass. It can be clear or opaque, whichever you prefer. Set it before you and consider it. If you are like O\ordinary folk, those who live lives largely governed by common sense, you will say that this thing you’ve set before you is obviously a drinking glass and that it is just silly to suggest it is not. What you would be implying is that what you experience as a glass, take as a drinking glass, is just so “out there,” beyond you or anyone else, regardless of what anyone thinks or perceives. It is, that is, a fact that what stands before you just is what you think and say it is, and there is no reason to reflect any further on the matter.

Let us, however, be attentive to the experience and what is given in experience that we are here talking about. I want you to look at this glass, and I want you, to the extent you have the discipline to do so, to dwell with the immediacy of what you are experiencing, disregarding what came before each moment prior to the immediacy of what you are experiencing, and I want you to rein in your tendency to anticipate what will be given in future moments of immediacy. That is, I want you to be attentive to what is present to you, right here and right now, in its presentiality, in its very presence. Do not move, do not look around; just be attentively present to what you are experiencing as you are experiencing it in its sensuous immediacy. Resist all attempts to think about the thing before you, to name it or place it in imagination among all the other things that make up your surroundings and your total life. In each moment of conscious perceptual flow—here, attending to your experience of sight and what is given in and through your experience of sight—what is actually given prior to any act of understanding, any thought about or memory of what you are seeing? You are immediately experiencing what we would, outside of this little experiment, we would call colors and shades of colors, hues and degrees of hues, shadow and light. What you are immediately seeing, without bringing in any memory or thought, without doing any work over what is being presented to you in your imagination, is a collage of color. Move, and (what we would, upon reflection, call) the collage of color changes. Move again, and it changes again—even if ever so slightly. Now, back up, as it were, from your disciplined attendance and consider what you are seeing but do so keeping in mind your focused, disciplined attention to the immediate perceptual flow of sight you just attended to: As you move around, moving through moment of immediate presence after moment of immediate presence, looking from different angles and vantage points, each moment of immediate and present perceptual flow is just like the moments you were attending to previously, but they are brought into a unity in light of your memory of such moments that have slipped into the past and your expectation, given past experiences, of moments of sensuous immediate presence that will arise and become present in the future; out of all that, gathered and orchestrated and held in and through memory, you come to experience an object in space, a three-dimensional thing, with all sorts of aspects and sides and ways in which it shows up in its particular place. That is, between the bare and immediate perceptual flow of your active sense of sight to the experience of what seems obviously to be a drinking glass in front of you, there intervenes a perhaps surprising amount of interpretive work. The same would go for other senses with which you engage what you come to understand, come to interpret, as obviously a glass: Through your sense of touch, for instance, you do not obviously touch a drinking glass, but rather you experience as given immediately in the perceptual flow of touch from present to present moment pressure, texture, hot and cold—all of which, in the light of memory, you synthesize into an interpreted whole, the engagement through touch with what you understand to be a glass. There is no fact of a drinking glass just being there, being presented straightforwardly as a three-dimensional whole in space apart from other things also so presented.⁴ And all of that precedes our recognition of the drinking glass as a drinking glass: to recognize it as such is, in the light of our various memories of communal practices and shared language passed down to us and our own experiences and use thereof, to remember it as something we use to drink; as with a baby who is encountering consciously an object for the first time, set such a thing before the earliest of humans, before the development of the technologies necessary to produce drinking glasses, and they wouldn’t know what to think of it or do with it. No, there is no fact of the drinking glass being there; rather, in light of memory, out of the perceptual flow of immediate sensuous experience we come to interpret as given in that experience a drinking glass.

Or take another supposed indisputable fact, that of our needing oxygen to breathe. If I were to claim that our needing oxygen to breathe is not a fact but rather one element of our total interpretation of the world and ourselves in it—one that I certainly agree with, but an instance of interpretation nonetheless—you might talk about how people deprived of oxygen die, and then perhaps you might demonstrate our vital use of oxygen by breathing in and out in an exaggerated way and then say, “See? It is clearly a fact that we need oxygen to live.” Again, however, let us be attentive, carefully attentive, to what we are saying and whence our understanding of what we are saying originates. For the sake of brevity, allow me to present in all too brief a way the vast and complicated story that would emerge for us, leaving you, the reader, to reflect on it at length at your leisure. From within conscious experience, and after we have gathered enough memories of conscious experience, we come, through reflection, to recognize in the perceptual flow of sensuous experience gathered from all five senses the togetherness of our bodies and the actions and our experiences of our bodies as singular wholes; some things thwart or undermine or sharply exaggerated in different ways our conscious experience of this or that aspect of our bodies, and some things simply facilitate the unremarkable continuation of the togetherness of our bodies and their actions. Through much conscious experience and reflection on conscious experience, and with the acquisition of language and the use of language, we are formed to call what we have come to notice or been led to notice about the experience of our bodies different things, to talk about it in different ways. Layers upon layers of remembered experiences and interpreted experiences lead us, finally, to a point where we can learn to understand something that we are doing each moment as breathing, and that this action that we have come to name and understand as such involves oxygen. And the role of oxygen in breathing, that arises out of a series of now-interconnected scientific models—imaginative and mathematical interpretations—of methodical interpretations of a whole array of different dimensions of experience by communities of thinkers through the centuries; for all we can now say, more and different relevant scientific models will be developed methodically in the future that will supplant those we take for granted and rely on now. No, it is not a fact that we need oxygen to breathe; rather, it is an interpretation of a vast array of conscious experiences and interlocking interpretations of conscious experience, all undertaken and received within interpretive contexts established through language and the giving and receiving of language—a true interpretation, perhaps, but an interpretation nonetheless and not something “out there” that exists somehow apart from experience and the interpretation of experience.

If there are no facts, only interpretations, whence truth? Whence our ability to so confidently navigate the world and develop ourselves and our communities leading all the way to regular orbital spacecraft launches and the curing of disease? If there are no facts, does not everything simply fall apart, leaving us with no ground to stand on? As interpretations are always contingent (they do not have to happen, as cases of profound psychological illness, disintegration, or psychosis attest), why have any confidence in what we think about anything, how we understand anything at all? Such questions are understandable, but they mistake, it seems to me, of conflating the contents of any act of interpretation with the act of interpretation itself. What someone understands the givens of experience to be may be different from epoch to epoch, community to community, but the act of interpretation, of understanding, is always the same; if it is always the same, then it has its own universal structure, which, along with all other cognitional and otherwise acts involved, unfolds well or badly. A key to seeing that such acts must be specifically the same, the same kind of act with the same kind of dynamic structure, from person to person and across contexts, may be found in the experience of communication. But that is something to take up at a later time.

1. Header image: Anton Melbye, Seascape (1843).

2. Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (The University of Chicago Press, 1998).

3. This article is a follow-up to a previous post in which I argued Gadamer's point that understanding just is interpretation. That post may be found here.

4. As many of my readers will note my analysis, here, relies heavily on the work of both Aristotle and Edmund Husserl. I would depart from the former by reducing the integrative work of what Aristotle calls the common sense across all five senses to the work of memory (something I shall have to take up and argue further in a later post). From the latter, I would depart in taking phenomenological analysis as one moment in a larger project of philosophical hermeneutics, thus aligning myself more with the line of thought stemming from Heidegger and finding further development in the work of, for instance, Gadamer.