Augustine on Active Perception

Abstract

Perception conceived of as an active process, built around the notions of unintentionally and attention, has assumed major significance in contemporary cognitive psychology and philosophy of mind. The roots of such a conception are, however, old. There was a strong tradition in the Middle Ages according to which the mind soul was seen not as a passive recipient of sensory stimuli but as the agent of its own acts and the efficient cause of perception. This is the tradition of medieval Augustinian philosophical psychology. According to this tradition, perception is the result of activity in the mind/soul, either reacting to the affection of the sense organs or taking the full initiative over what is perceived through some sort of direct contact with the object. In order to show how such a tradition developed it is necessary first to present Augustine's theory of perception, its many tenets and its many inconsistencies and difficulties: this will serve not only to clarify Augustine's theory but also to set the background against which later medieval accounts of perception were to be drawn. It was Augustine who drafted, in a non-systematic way, the theory of active perception as defined above, incorporating Platonic and Stoic influences but subjecting them to his theological project—his model of the mind as the image of the divine trinity being a clear case in point. In what follows I purposefully avoid two aspects of Augustine's theory of perception—his physiological descriptions of the process and his extramissionist account of vision—for the same reason: no matter where in the process the doings of the agent of perception, the powers of the soul encounter the physical objects, what needs to be explained is how this interaction, mediated by the body, is epistemologically relevant, in other words conducive to the acquisition of knowledge of the external thing. I take this interaction to be an instrumental aspect of the theory and prefer to concentrate on the philosophical problem of what is known. I do not address the issue of conceptually laden perception either, at least not directly. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved)