Aude Saint Joanis
Unfathomable Colour
Perceive Colour to Apprehend Reality
AAD Dissertation Studio 18 2020–21
Extracts from Aude Saint Joanis, Unfathomable Colours: Perceive Colour to Apprehend Reality
Dissertation Studio 18 Modes of Human Exchange (Being-with and without) Tutor: Nicholas Temple
School of Art, Architecture and Design London Metropolitan University 2021
In this paper the colour pink is especially examined for various reasons. To pay tribute to those particularities, each page is coloured in a slightly different hue of the colour, only noticeable if paying close attention to it. This has for purpose to illustrate the concept of psychological colours distance.
THE NATURE OF COLOUR A brief introduction This question has fascinated many researchers from various backgrounds but remains mainly the preserve of philosophers. Relying on many other fields, they have come up with an enormous number of theories and one could argue that there are almost as many theories as there are philosophers involved. Nevertheless, three main schools of thought, at the source of all others, stand out. Realist, Subjectivist and Illusionist points of view cannot be reconciliated. As the name of the first one suggests it is based on the “real”, only recognizing the materiality of colour, photons bouncing on reflective surface producing in the eye a simple reaction to a stimulus. The illusionist theory is at the total opposite of the latter. Its supporters believe that colour perception or other conscious experiences of colour do not hold any physicality nor existence outside the mind of the perceiver. Between those contradictory opinions stands the Subjectivist point of view which conceives a duality between the physical world and its materiality and the personal experience of the mind. Those three pillars of the philosophical reflection on colour are largely simplified as the subject is vast and dense but will work as a strong base for newcomers to the subject. A definitive answer regarding the physicality and perception of colour has not yet been found but these elements of reflexion provide some insight on some of the trickiest debate surrounding the subject.
The realist approach Prior to any other concepts, the question surrounding the essential nature of colour is fundamental. This idea of a “formal determination” appeared in the 18th century while the wave theory was developed, questioning the different “qualia” colours, as light, could possess.1 Multiple answers to this debate can be deemed valid depending on the philosophical opinion one adopts. In the first-place relation between colour and light needs to be questioned. Taking on the atomical point of view, colour is only a “secondary quality” of light and is not one of its actual property, only maintaining a casual dependence to it. Newton states: “for the rays to speak properly are not coloured. In them there is nothing else than a certain power or disposition to stir up a sensation of this or that colour.”2 For the Realist, colour is the exact opposite. They believe that colours can only “belong to” the surfaces of objects and therefore have a proper materiality. Most of Realist ensuing theories pose a certain number of questions and show inconsistencies according to other philosophers. Ahead of all of them is found colours impenetrability, the impossibility for two colours to fill the exact same area at the exact same time.3 This property of colour is accepted by many but cannot be conciliated with a majority of Realist positions as they: “give rise to an important paradox: how can purple, to take an example, be composed of blue and red without them being located in the same place at the same time?”4
The principal problem revolves around compound colours, phenomenal colours belonging to this category.5 The premise being that matter is impenetrable by matter and therefore so should be colour by colour. Compenetration (stating that colours can withhold many qualities at once) and Simplicity theory (supporting the impenetrability, that rejects this multiplicity) confront without one having a real ascendent on the other.6 Others have tried to tackle the problem with more creative solutions as Brenato did, when proposing a chessboard of colours. From a more unexpected background, Kandisky developed the “Autonomy of colour” theory, without finding any probative/compelling solutions. He suggested that colours even if transformed or mixed were existing by themselves and for themselves comparing the process to music or alchemy.7
Mind dependence and perceptual variations Realist positions demonstrate a real innate problem of reflexion as they ignore the most important element related to colours which is human nature. I will now concentrate on both Illusionist and Subjectivist theories as they take the subjective quality of experience into account. Both positions involve a key concept: the idea of psychological colours. It is not about how colours could possibly change your mood as marketing people would like you to believe but about the intrinsic mind-dependence of colours.8 It states that “colours are properties whose essential nature is constitutively dependent on the experiences of perceiving subjects.”9 It is more largely connected to the idea that considers colours as mental properties. From this mind dependence three subjects arise10: the perceptual consistency and variations, the knowledge theory and finally the mind body problem. Those points of interest cover indifferently both Illusionist and Subjectivist theories and said identified issue are only there to interrogate different lines of approach, as no definite answer can be agreed upon. When talking about psychological colours the first obstacle consists in applying precise and transferable “measurements” to a subjective perception. This perception is composed of visual stimuli that can be measured and registered, and visual experience which is fully personal and cannot be observed. Colours are not scrutable and yet researchers are able to determine that a group of individual suffering from the same condition, or even receiving the same retinal image, do not achieve the same visual perception. Equal characteristic of vision is not universally applicable especially when referring to the perception of the relations among colours. An absolute colour-space metric cannot be applied in a subjective experience. Therefore, scientists have developed a “psychological distance” between colours that allows to individually delimitate colours and place them on a scale.11 The unit of this scale is called discrimination distance which is the smallest physical difference in wavelength that the human eye can detect. This approach removes the idea of the universal rule and places the relativity of perception at the centre of our understanding. Perceptual variation is a very debated subject as it induces some very strong philosophical and psychological problems. For phenomenal objectivist colour could be the result that no “real colour” exists as no “real shape” exists based on the variation of shape or colour when the object is exposed to different lightings or perspectives, concept also referred to as relational property.12 This idea would indeed solve the question of the perceptual variation, but it also generates several other issues. First it denies the perspectivism of colours, the notion that no one has access to an absolute view of the world.
It also poses a challenge towards perception consistency as it is not possible to experience an object appearing two different ways. Indeed, the relational property forbids the perceiver to imagine how a colour would behave under different conditions that the one experienced unless if exposed to it.13 How to imagine colour reaction “if there is no property to which we have epistemological access that unifies the different appearances. In advance of actually seeing how the object behave as the conditions vary, we have no reason for thinking that an object that looks a certain way in these conditions will look one way rather than any other in another set of conditions.”14 The barrier that consistency of perception imposes has pushed adepts of psychological position, in opposition to physicalists, to develop the “colour similarity argument”.15 The main principle of the theory revolves around the inscrutability of colours, meaning that if colours had different property of reflection, they should be observable, which is not the case. There is no physical fact that proves colour similarity, but it is in this absence that the answer is found. Indeed, no difference of reaction in the brain can be linked to different types of reflection or light wavelength. The purpose of this idea is not to reject all physicalists’ ideas as some are undeniable, but mostly add to it a further understanding of its relation to human perception: “the reflectance types that we identify with the colours will be quite uninteresting from the point of view of physics or any other branch of science unconcerned with the reactions of human perceivers. This fact does not however, imply that these categories are unreal or somehow subjective. It is a plain matter of fact that an object has a particular type of reflectance, and this fact need not depend in any interesting way on the existence of creatures with colour vision.”16 It then seems then very dull to exclude the human mind, untaken fortress of the personal experience, of the questioning around the perception of colours. The inscrutability, or lack of physicality, should be understood as an empirical knowledge of the vision and not as an introspection of a visual experience. In simpler words we do not que stion our vision, analysing what shapes and colours we perceive, and then decide what to understand from it, we have this knowledge as a simple truth condition on a metaphysical level and not as a choice. The reluctance of some to apply to it physical barriers can only limit our understanding, Will Davies states “the resulting view is that despite an extremely tight metaphysical relationship between colours and reflectance properties, there nonetheless exist genuine epistemic barriers to acquiring knowledge of facts about colour structure at the level of the reducing physical theory.”17 The same principle applies to the learning and understanding of colours without it being an issue, probably because in the case of colours the scientific community struggles to concede their inability to seize some more metaphysical aspects of the human consciousness: “the thought is that there is something so peculiarly subjective or first-personal about phenomenal consciousness that it seems that one could never provide a fully adequate account or explanation of the distinctive nature of conscious states within a purportedly objective or third-personal scientific theory of the brain.”18
Being and looking coloured As a result of the above principles arises the intrinsic difference between being and looking coloured, the distinction between a visual experience and seeing.19 The difference can appear meagre but can transform the whole quality of experience. In the case of hallucinations, for example, visions are real for the perceiver but disconnected from the perceived object. A more commonly experienced concept is the example of the difference between a blue wall under a white light, and a white wall under a blue light. This concept constitutes a base for ‘colour relationalism’ where colours are defined in terms of relation to the subject. The disconnection between the physical object and the perceiver experience inspired Frank Jackson to create in 1982 a now very famous thought experiment: Mary the super-scientist.20 Mary living in a black and white world knows everything there is to be known about colour but never had the chance to experiment it herself. Will Mary learn something new when she will see pink for the first time?21 The perceptual experience of colour, also known as the knowledge argument, tries to establish that there are non-physical properties and unattainable knowledge that can be discovered only through conscious experience. Hume was the first to consider this duality of perception. For him two kind exists, the impressions, including sensations, passions and emotions, and the ideas, highlighting the connection between experiences and knowledge.22 Mary, as she does not have any first-person experience, somehow lack of experience knowledge. More generally, it opens the debate about seeing colours as a knowledge or as an ability. There are two main opposite main approaches on the subject. Empiricism promotes the idea that people arrive to the world with no knowledge and all development is purely experienced based, and Nativism which promotes the opposite idea that humans already possess many know-hows from birth.23 Debates around knowledge and ability are not only the ones of a better understanding of our senses but also breach the topic of the separation of body and the human mind: “the explanatory gap between mind and body”.24 There is an institutional separation between the two, one flagrant example being the clear disconnection between art and science.25 Artists have for a long time tried and sometimes succeeded to tame colours in their own ways, without wondering about its reflectance, unaware of the complex processes of our optical system. One aspect though, that has always interested creatives though, is how colours are felt, received and how through colours different sensations arise. This aspect of colour in more traditional science has often been overlooked or misunderstood even though many thinkers have reached the conclusion that merging those two aspects could lead to a better understanding of the human mind and possibly achieve a unified theory of colour perception: “We have in the subject of colour a quite specific example of the 2cultures, in which artist and scientist speak a language the other does not understand. We have a responsibility to put an end to this dichotomy, and if, as I now believe, the scientists’ concept of colour is incomplete then it is a high time we developed a more adequate philosophy of colour to which both artists and scientist can subscribe”.26 The mind-body problem is often confused with an overdeveloped case of ontological consciousness,27 sometimes compared to a matter of personal sensitivity and emotional state influencing perceptions, making it look like a non-intentional quality of the experience when there is in fact an actual psychological reality of colour cognition. Our perception cannot be considered as a stage of awareness that could be studied as this experience is already the perceiver of everything: “In that case, there are no philosophically interesting conclusion to be drawn from the thought experiment concerning the nature of the mind’s conscious state and their experienced content, the importance of “qualia” generally in the life of the mind, or the comparative merits of different kinds of explanations of consciousness and related cognitive phenomena, reductive or eliminative mind-body identity theory, physicalism or functionalism versus causally efficacious “qualia” and intentional states.”28
THE HUMAN NEED FOR TRANSCENDENCE The role of imagination The reasons why philosophy is relevant to our attempt to grasp the meaning (and ‘reality’) of colour requires an understanding of deeper historical and theological issues, beyond the scope of this essay. Nevertheless, these questions have generated much recent literature on the question of the subjective/ objective nature of colour, evidenced for example in Barry Stroud’s The Quest for Reality: Subjectivism and the Metaphysics of Colour.29 Notwithstanding the deep history of light metaphysics from Plato to modern phenomenological debates, the field of research on colour perception is still in its early days with recent developments in neurobiology and neuroscience that have opened up new areas of inquiry. Nagel studied extensively the subjective quality of experience in colour studies and wanted to create an experience “not dependant on empathy or imagination”.30 The subjective quality of experience is something everyone is subject to and is stopping the perceiver from objectively understanding any other perception but their own. “At present we are completely unequipped to think about the subjective characters of experience without taking up the point of view of the experiential subject.”31 It is interesting to talk about the primordial role of imagination in the vision of colours.32 Humans have the capacity to imagine colour, visualize it and remember it.33 The brain also has the capacity to create colours that do not exist, called chimerical or forbidden colours, they are proof of the active answer of the brain to a stimulus. Humans are not able to perceive those colours in a normal environment as the plasticity of the human eye does not allow the overlapping of certain colours (red/green or yellow/blue) but can be seen by using the fatigue cone cell process. The ability to visualize colours is discrete but crucial in our day-to-day life as the perceiver is constantly required to improvise on missing information of its environment, creating a unique psychological perception. The idea that the mind perpetually corrects information coming from the eye and creates colours absent of our visual field was first mentioned by Goethe in his book “Theory of colour”.34 The power of human imagination does not stop there, through it a vast world of possibility is unveiled. Imaginative associations, automatic connections or cross-modal sensory effects are especially relevant as they arise naturally in everyone, some even including synaesthesia. This interest in transcending the senses emerged in the late 19th century but was progressively abandoned as advancements in neurobiology was made. Today many scientists with the help of more recent discoveries are reinvesting the field, testing the limits of our imagination and more generally of the mind, trying to re-create the qualitative feel Nagel was theorising thirty years prior.35
Redeeming barriers This renewed curiosity for transcendence has not ceased in the last decade. It has found applications in the medical field as vibrating devices are used to “make see” blind people.36 It is also employed in artistic practices where Harbison, artist born with congenital colour blindness, uses a computer than can make him hear colours to paint. Of course, those abilities only come with a considerable amount of training but prove the brain cells adaptability to transfer sensory content. It opens a new path of research for defenders of synaesthesia. This tendency has not only been deployed out of necessity to compensate a sense deficiency but also from a general interest of the population regarding total artwork,37 virtual reality devices or even the search of yet unexperienced sensations such as the absence of gravity. The impetus towards spiritual and physical transcendence seems meaningful to me as it is the result of a general will to improve our technological abilities. It is also motivated by the urge of humanity to exceed itself in order to escape its condition and physicality. This desire seems deeply rooted in our society. This was first expressed through the fantasy of omniscient gods and more recently illustrated not only by the renewed interest of science for the subject, but also by the many references found in futuristic /science fiction cultural content. Unfortunately, it is only a fiction, as the subjective quality of experience is the core structure of our consciousness, the mind body problem being its perfect illustration. Seeing through someone else’s eyes would make as much sense as seeing through the ears or smelling through the eyes; the content of one sense cannot be substituted for another’s.38 This is the reason why, if each one “invents” its own reality it can be argued that two perceivers’ vision could be qualified as two different senses, therefore rendering a switch impossible. As restrictive as it may sound, these barriers to our vision and more generally to our perception also offer advantages. This inability to exchange perception with others allows individuals to conserve a psychological reality, the self being unchanged, unchallenged and eternally trapped in its own perception at the centre of its reality. Being able to go past it would destroy individuality to the benefit of a merged global consciousness. “How things can appear to one is restricted rather by one’s sensitivity to the world.”39 This non-intentional quality of experience forces humans to keep a plurality of the world vision. Even though the merging of perception is not yet a possibility for us, through the study of colours, it offers to society a great opportunity towards innovation. Transcendence should be pursued as it offers a large array of possibilities in the research of the colour’s essential nature.
1 Zika, Fay. “Colour and Sound: Transcending the Limits of the Senses.” 29-46. 2 Ibid. 3 Massin, Olivier, and Marion Hämmerli. “Is Purple a Red and Blue Chessboard? Brentano on Colour Mix tures.” The Monist 100, no. 1 (2017): 37-63. Accessed May 3, 2021. 4 Ibid. 5 Colours ‘composed’ of two colours. 6 Massin, Olivier, Hämmerli. “Is Purple a Red and Blue Chessboard? Brentano on Colour Mixtures.” 37-63. 7 Sheringham, Michael. “Language, Colour, and the Enigma of Everydayness.” 198-218. 8 Allen, Keith. “Revelation and the Nature of Colour.” Dialectica 65, no. 2 (2011): 153-76. Accessed May 3, 2021. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 Kay, Paul, and Willett Kempton. “What Is the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis?” American Anthropologist, New Series, 86, no. 1 (1984): 65-79. Accessed May 3, 2021. 12 Allen, Keith. “Being Coloured and Looking Coloured.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 39, no. 4 (2009): 647-70. Accessed May 3, 2021. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. 15 Davies, Will. “The Inscrutability of Colour Similarity.” Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition 171, no. 2 (2014): 289-311. Accessed May 3, 2021. 16 Ibid. 17 Davies, Will. “The Inscrutability of Colour Similarity.” Philosophical Studies, 289-311. 18 Ibid. 19 Searle, John R. “The Philosophy of Perception and the Bad Argument.” In Wirklichkeit Oder Konstruk tion?: Sprachtheoretische Und Interdisziplinäre Aspekte Einer Brisanten Alternative, edited by Felder Ekkehard and Gardt Andreas, 66-76. Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter, 2018. Accessed May 4, 2021. 20 Jackson, Frank. “What Mary Didn’t Know.” The Journal of Philosophy 83, no. 5 (1986): 291-95. Accessed May 3, 2021 21 Especially relevant as pink is a non-spectral colour. 22 Jacquette, Dale. “Hume On Color Knowledge, with an Application to Jackson’s Thought Experiment.” His tory of Philosophy Quarterly 29, no. 4 (2012): 355-71. Accessed May 3, 2021.
23 Wright, Macleod. “PERCEPTION.” 50-62. 24 Jackson, Frank. “What Mary Didn’t Know.” 291-95. 25 Snow, ‘’Two cultures’’ quoted in Fish, Jonathan C. “Colour as Sensation in Visual Art and in Science.” Leonardo 14, no. 2 (1981): 89-98. Accessed May 3, 2021. 26 Wright quoted in Fish, “Colour as Sensation in Visual Art and in Science.” 89-98. 27 Searle “The Philosophy of Perception and the Bad Argument.” 66-76. 28 Jacquette, “Hume On Color Knowledge, with an Application to Jackson’s Thought Experiment.” 355-71. 29 Barry Stroud, The Quest for Reality: Subjectivism and the Metaphysics of Colour (New York, US: Oxford University Press, 2000). 30 Nagel quoted in Zika, “Colour and Sound: Transcending the Limits of the Senses.” 29-46. 31 Ibid. 32 Pearce, Mary. “Colour as a Bridge between Art and Science.” 59-74. 33 Ibid. 34 Zika, “Colour and Sound: Transcending the Limits of the Senses.” 29-46. 35 Ibid. 36 Gesamtkunstwerk quoted in Zika, “Colour and Sound: Transcending the Limits of the Senses.” 29-46. 37 Ibid. 38 Martin, M. G. F. “Perception, Concepts, and Memory.” The Philosophical Review 101, no. 4 (1992): 74563. Accessed May 3, 2021. 39 Sheringham, Michael. “Language, Colour, and the Enigma of Everydayness.” 198-218.
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