In Hope of Recognition: The Morality of Perception

When the Bible salesman is invited to stay for dinner, Hulga Hopewell immediately recognizes the young man sitting across the table from her as something true to type, a pitiable exemplar of those her mother would classify as "good country people," which happens to be the title of Flannery O'Connor's 1955 short story where this scene takes place (see 1978). ¹ Hulga's assessment of Manley Pointer is a preliminary judgment and as such is not particularly perceptive. It signifies what John Dewey calls "recognition," which is "a beginning of an act of perception" cut short, or "perception arrested before it has a chance to develop freely" (2005, 54). Unlike mere recognition, perception requires the work of the intelligence and demands careful observation and engaged attention. It is also an aesthetic capacity through which connections are drawn and links in meaning are forged as a complete picture is formed. In contrast, "recognition" means to simply identify. To recognize, in Dewey's sense, is to catalog or categorize, to distinguish by type, to summarily file away. It does not "serve the development of a full perception of the thing recognized" (Dewey 2005, 55). Recognition can be said to be quasi-perceptual, since it constitutes a kind of partial seeing, and to the degree that it is blind to nuance and complexity, it is not quite moral, for the same reason. Dewey writes, "In recognition we fall back, as upon a stereotype, upon some previously formed scheme. Some detail or arrangement of details serves as cue for bare identification" (2005, 58-59). Stereotyping gives short shrift to those who may be briefly subject to our attention, and this constitutes not just perceptual inadequacy but moral failure.

This failure is twofold, for as we give short shrift to others, so we are implicated in a certain blindness toward ourselves, a myopia that can be ignored until some event catches us off guard. In the art of tragedy peripeteia marks the reversal of fortune suffered by the hero in a tragic drama (Aristotle, On Poetics, circa 390 B.C.E. [see 2002]). Experiential disruption and reversal of fortune turn attention back in on the self. Here recognition is not to be understood in a Deweyan superficial sense but as something like Gestalt. What was previously covered over and ignored breaks in on perceptual consciousness, shattering the illusory ties with what was never the case. This experiential jolt may eventually become a catalyst for reflection and new insight. It requires careful forging of a new "relationship between what is done and what is undergone" and "constitutes the work of intelligence," in Dewey's (2005, 47) phrase.

When an experience is jarring to the point that thought stops, perceptual acuity is also arrested. "Esthetic perception" necessitates a certain distance; otherwise meaning is distorted, and "experience is equally distorted" (Dewey 2005, 51, 47). In other words, for Dewey, experience does not simply bestow meaning; perceptual discernment is the activity of making/discerning means through experience. As he emphasizes, "Some decisive action is needed in order to establish contact with the realities of the world and in order that impressions may be so related to facts that their value is tested and organized" (2005, 47). Experiential shock puts us into question; who we are or the way we think of ourselves is ungrounded, challenged. What is to be made of this? At issue here is not a question of identity as such but has something to do with our relationship to the world and to others—at the most basic level it is a dissolution of connection at the most basic level of "interaction of organism and environment" (Dewey 2005, 22). Everything is changed. There appears an irremediable gap between the shattered self and the world.

Dewey perceived "one of the most serious problems of philosophy" to be a kind of paradox implicit in the possibility of "genuine communication," the social embodiment of aesthetic and perceptual attention (2005, 348). For "some thinkers deny" what Dewey believes the possibility of communication must presuppose: "the nature of community of experience" (2005, 348...