αἴσθησις

1. Perception from the senses, feeling, hearing, seeing
2. Perception by the intellect as well as the senses
3. Ability to perceive: discernment
4. Cognition or discernment of moral discernment in ethical matters

Harmon Chapman in his paper for ‘ Aisthesis and Aesthetics’ the Fourth Lexington Conference on Pure and Applied Phenomenology in 1967 argues for the classical theory which regards perception as ‘the dual actualisingof both self (mind) and other (world) as opposed to modern theory – post – Descarte which regards perception as a private process of constitution which estranges the other and reduces the self to an anonymous observer of its own fabrications.’

He refers to Plato’s Theory of Knowledge as the foundational understanding of sense perception. This theory according to Cornford contains elements borrowed from Protagorus and Heraclitus. He claims that the ‘principal thesis is Heraclitean: “everything is motion (or change)”, that is, what we ordinarily call objects are really processes. This thesis is supplemented by three divisions of motions into kinds;

1. change of place and change of quality

2. fast and slow motions

3. motions which have the power of acting and those which have the power of being acted on ie. the “power’ of responding to the former as cause or stimulus.

Socrates concludes from all this ‘that nothing is one thing just by itself, but is always in process of becoming for someone, and being is ruled out altogether

Aristotle – ‘prior to sense perception things are only ‘potentially’ sensible, after sense perception they are ‘actually’ sensible.

 

As a practitioner of an aesthetic practice (Stewart The Open Studio) I am interested in the sensorial – the pre-rational – what Kristeva calls the semiotic and Deleuze refers to according to Daniel Smith who translated the Logic of Senses a recognition of the simultaneity of sensation and perception and Grosz invokes as ‘irridescent chaos’.

“The pre-rational world of sensation is not ‘prior’ to the world of perception or representation but strictly speaking is co-extensive’ with it. (Smith Logic of Sensationpg xiv)