While perception is the starting point of our engagement with the world, it is ironic that the human description of the world is populated with all kinds of unperceivable things. It is the invisible, untouched, unheard, and unfelt things that are the most important building blocks of the world. Ontology is the term used by philosophers to describe the set of things, both perceived and unperceived, that are seen to be “real” in some sense.
Ontology is not merely of philosophical interest; our everyday life is filled with belief in entities that are not perceivable by the five senses. These include soul, god, self, mind, consciousness, space, time, concepts like justice, beauty and goodness, atoms, fields, matter.
Not only are these and many such entities part of our everyday world, but even the perception of a physical object – like a chair – is filled with assumptions about entities that are not physical. For example, to see a chair, we need light. We say that it exists in space. We assume that light is real. But can we see light by itself? We see an object because light bounces off the object and falls on our eyes. In this process, we are not seeing light per se but only the object that is illuminated by light. If you can see light by itself without an object to reflect it, then you should be able to see the chair and the light as it travels from the chair to the eye.
You might respond by saying that we can see the light from the sun. But do we actually see light as it travels from the sun? We see light beams only because of the dust and other particles in the air. If you are in empty space in the universe, it will seem really dark, even though billions of light sources are present.
A philosophical mode of thinking is to not assert whether entities like light and space can exist or not, but to understand how such things could exist. How is it possible to imagine the existence of these numerous entities that are so much a part of our beliefs but are not perceived through the five senses?
We who can see are “blind”, we only see certain qualities but not many others.
Two branches of philosophy reflect the nature of these enquiries. One is the exploration of what kinds of things can exist. It is a list of things that we sense, as well as those we don’t but for some reason believe in. This domain is called ontology. But the what-question is not enough. To understand these objects, we have to understand how they exist so as to give an account of the nature of their existence. Such a view is encompassed in an important branch of philosophy called metaphysics. If physics is about the physical world, metaphysics is an enquiry into the nature of this reality.
Ontology and metaphysics are part of all disciplines, as well as our daily lives and actions. An ontology of science will include atoms, molecules, electrons, quarks, black holes, galaxies, universe, DNA, genes, fields, forces and a plethora of properties. Each discipline of science has its own set of objects that it analyses and discovers. A metaphysics of science will be an inquiry into how we can understand something like force or electrons to be a real entity. Metaphysics of sub-atomic objects like electrons and quarks analyses the “true” nature of these objects.
What kind of things are they? Do they have colour and shape like the objects that we see? If they don’t have these qualities, then why would they be an object at all? These questions are different from empirical, observational questions such as the value of the charge of an electron or its mass. Discovering these empirical results is the task of science, whereas philosophical inquiry is about a basic understanding of the nature of these objects, the manner of their existence, and how we come to have knowledge of them.
Ontology of the social sciences will include objects of study in the social sciences such as society, social relation, kinship, social action, money, capital. Is a society or a nation real like a chair? If not, in what sense are they assumed to be “there”? The ontology of mathematics is equally interesting and challenging. Mathematicians talk as if mathematical objects like numbers, sets, functions, groups and so on have an independent existence. These mathematical terms do not have shape, size, colour, taste or smell. Then in what sense are they real? The truths of mathematics only make sense if these entities are seen to “exist”. Philosophy of mathematics offers many important insights into this problem.
So also in the field of arts. Why do visual artists produce the kind of paintings and sculptures that they do? Why can’t they paint a tree or a face exactly as they see it? Artists respond by saying that the image they produce is the way that object is seen by them. Their figures represent the truth of what they see and experience. The kind of things that are real for art include aesthetic qualities (those that make us recognise something as being beautiful, for instance), form, matter, colours, textures.
There is an ontology of the kitchen – the list of things that you take to be real in the act of cooking, in the various qualities that we ascribe to food and tastes. The field of music has a rich ontology ranging from the nature of sound, notes, ragas, and emotions associated with them. Theatre is another domain which has a rich connection with ontology and metaphysics. It can be viewed (along with some aspects of architecture) as the domain of practical exploration of philosophical ideas. We will discuss all these examples in greater detail later.
When you see a tree in front of you, you see colour, shape and size, and objects like leaves and flowers which are part of the tree. A biological description of this process only complicates the picture. Information about the various qualities of the tree goes from the eye to the brain. But all the information from a single tree does not go to the same part of the brain. The colour of the tree is registered at some place in the brain. But the shape and size are registered somewhere else. The word “tree”, which is a way of referring to one single, unified object, is registered in another part of the brain. Truly, the brain functions like a government office where there are different departments where information about colour, size, shape, smell, memory etc., are filed. But when you cognise the tree as one object, it is possible only because all this information is unified together as “belonging” to that single object.
The philosopher’s account of the simple act of seeing a tree is analogous to the biological model. When you see a tree, you are experiencing colour, shape, size etc. Each of these experiences has a different quality to it. But then how do these different experiences unify into one experience of a single object called the tree? What entity does this job? For biology, the brain is the organ that accomplishes this task. But is the brain enough? Is it up to the demands of this complex task?
To answer this, we have to go back to the nature of perception. Our sense organs are all directed outwards. The eyes look at the world outside our bodies. The hands reach out to touch objects outside our body. So too the sense of smell through which we can smell objects such as fruits outside our body.
However, our body has a dimension, it has a thickness. Unfortunately, we do not have eyes inside our bodies which can help us see our organs directly. We cannot touch our insides with our hands, although we seem to have the capacity to hear our inner body. Such as the gurgles from the stomach and the laboured breathing of the lungs. We can feel the beat of the heart, which can be understood as a sense of touch between the body and an inner organ.
There is another dimension to sound and its relation to the inner body. Even if you close your ears to all external sounds, you can hear yourself speaking. This experience is baffling because although the avenue for sound through the eardrums is closed, we can hear ourselves speak. How can you describe that experience of listening to something while your ears are closed to all external sounds? Who is listening? Speaking too is an odd experience here, since the mouth is closed and your vocal cords don’t seem to be involved. Who is speaking? What does that “inner voice” sound like? Like yours?
Trying to make sense of these phenomena catalyses ideas such as self, soul, time, space and the mind. These ideas are products of human thinking. They appear not in front of our physical eyes but before the eyes of the mind. When the French mathematician-philosopher Rene Descartes uses the term “mind’s eye”, it is to suggest that the mind can “see” things in the world that the physical eyes cannot. But what is the process of this “vision” of the mind? One can identify this process of mind’s seeing with what we call thinking. Just as the process of seeing shows the world of things outside our body, so too do the processes of thinking open up a world of ideas. The mind is thought to do the job of thinking, along with various other mental activities. Given the enormous investment in understanding the world opened up by thought, we might be justified in saying that this fascination with the dark insides of our body/mind has erased the importance of the open world in front of our eyes.
The invisible mind is itself an apt candidate for philosophical analysis. It is philosophers who have caused this confusion about the mind. In the modern context, the culprit is Rene Descartes. But there is nothing obvious about his view. Indian philosophies for the most part use the concept of the mind, although they differ in many important aspects from the Descartian notion. We will explore these ideas in more detail later.
But philosophers cannot escape the attraction towards light and vision. They understand their act as “throwing light”, ‘shining light’ on what cannot be seen. They often associate light with the act of thinking. They commonly use terms such as “Insight”, “knowledge as light”, “ignorance as darkness”, “thinking as dispelling darkness”, and “Enlightenment” to express the value of thinking in terms of the qualities of light. These are visual metaphors of thinking. Thinking lights up the inner darkness of our bodies and in this brightness, we can “see” through the mind’s eye. We have produced remarkable ideas about the natural and human world, not just through perception of these worlds but through the act of thinking and its many correlates like reflecting, imagining, analysing, synthesising and so on. This too adds to the value of thinking since it is only through thought that we can “understand” what we perceive.
Philosophy is this act of illuminating the invisible, the unseen, the unheard, the untouched. Thinking, imagining and acting are the tools by which this unperceivable world is not only made perceivable but also something through which meaningful action is possible.
Other articles in this series
Sundar Sarukkai on how philosophy can be a living tradition in our lives today
‘Do we perceive the world or do we think it?’ Sundar Sarukkai on thinking in philosophy
Another Story of Philosophy will be published by Westland Books. Sundar Sarukkai’s recent books include Philosophy for Children, The Social Life of Democracy, and the novel Following a Prayer. For more details, see the author’s website.
