Because the leisurely use of the camera facilitates this shift, casual photography becomes at the same time a way to enter into a peculiar mode of thinking we could call, following the tradition, ‘practical thinking’, which is different from another that we can call ‘theoretical thinking’. The transition of interest marks the corresponding transition from one such mode of thinking to the other. Philosophical psychology has highlighted these two modes of thinking and their distinct interests. Aristotle, for example, talks of reasoning that is ‘theoretical’ compared to reasoning that is ‘practical’. When reasoning theoretically, one’s interest is in the truth of things. One aspires, in reasoning theoretically, to offer a factually accurate description of a reality. However, when one begins to enquire what one should do in the light of such a truth, one begins to think in the practical mode, and so reasons practically. When thinking in the theoretical mode, some logics peculiar to this mode of thinking guide one’s reasoning: ‘something cannot be and not be at the same time and in the same respect’, for instance, and hence, one judges contradictions to be unreasonable. Correspondingly, when thinking in the practical mode, some logics peculiar to this mode of thinking begins to guide one’s reasoning: “that which is good ought to be done and whatever is evil ought to be avoided; such-and-such is good, and its contrary is evil…”
The logic that guides thinking when we think in the practical mode also identifies to us what is “good”, and what is “evil”. By “good” and “evil” here, I do not mean what we like or dislike, or what we find useful for something else we value or damaging to something else we value; rather I mean that which is desirable in-itself, or undesirable in-itself. This being the case, casual photography becomes a valuable formative tool for our grasp of some very fundamental ideas about what is intrinsically good and evil just as it facilitates access to thinking in the practical mode. The need to enter into a mode of thinking that is practical rather than merely theoretical in order to grasp good and evil has not always been well understood. Some have attempted to derive a theory of good and evil through the study of certain facts about the human being, or facts about the natural world. However, such attempts turn out, on closer inspection, to be logically indefensible. Logicians point out that the attempt to derive an account of what “ought to be” from an account of what “is the case” violates the conservation of logic. Labeled the “naturalistic fallacy”, any such derivation concludes more than the premises allow. Rather than to deduce theoretically an account of good and evil, good and evil can be known when we think practically. Our knowledge of good and evil is therefore not deduced from any prior ideas. Rather they are “self-evident”, underived. John Finnis’ Natural Law and Natural Rights (1980) is representative of this view.
Although these ideas about what is good and evil are “self-evident”, this does not mean that we grasp them without any prior data. They are not ‘intuitions’ we get from sitting contemplatively in an armchair. While we cannot deduce these moral ideas, we can certainly abduce them. When thinking in the practical mode, our experience of certain facts gives rise to those normative judgments about what is good and evil. Let me suggest that this abductive process that gives rise to our knowledge of good and evil is really a semiosis. What happens is that our minds are being pointed to these moral ideas by the facts we experience: see, hear, smell, feel, taste. When we sense facts in the world, and when we do so thinking in the practical mode, certain states of affairs appeal to us as good, and others as evil. If we can analyze this process as a triad of the ‘sign-vehicle’, the ‘signified’, and the ‘interpretant’, (see Deely, 1990) then we could possibly identify these three terms respectively as the ‘experienced phenomena’, the ‘moral ideas about good and evil’, and finally, what medieval thinkers call ‘synderesis’ (see Aquinas, 1954: 304).
Now, synderesis, which is that certain natural habitual capability (habitus) of the mind to yield our foundational moral judgments, operates as the interpretant within the semiotic triad of sign-signified-interpretant. As interpretant, it relates the experienced phenomena to the foundational moral ideas, pointing the sign-vehicle to the signified. Yet as interpretant, it needs to be activated by the sign-vehicle; without the sign-vehicle, synderesis does not of itself achieve the signification of foundational moral ideas. In this respect casual photography becomes all the more pedagogically useful for our formative grasp of good and evil. For: in doing photography we are compelled to go out and collect images, and not only are we put in the practical mode of thinking, we are also put in the touch with all that our senses can take in, especially what we can see. This becomes all the likelier when we use fixed focal lenses and have to be physically present to our subject matter, as one might do say, in range-finder photography. We are out in the streets in close encounter with signs—signs that activate synderesis, and therefore enable the grasp of good and evil. The casual photographer is, as it were, surrounded by signs of good and evil.
(My) Marriage: A Basic Good. Leica II 5cm Elmar f/3.5 Kodak ISO 400