How does it change us, to make these fine-grained attempts at separating what we perceive from what is actually there? This isn’t just a matter of how we understand physical objects. It can also have profound impacts on how we understand people.
Among other things, this is a fascinating feminist topic. Sex-positive feminists sometimes deny innate differences in the level of sexual desire between men and women by pointing to the odd fact that, in medieval times, it was common to say that women are lascivious and sexual. This shows, they say, that there is some kind of social construction of which sex is the sexual one. It used to be women. Now it’s men.
Without meaning any particular rancour towards sex-positive feminists, I think this may be an interpretive error. It may be, in fact, that these medieval men were saying that women are sexual in the same way that an apple is red—as a sense impression that necessarily indicates a quality present in the object. By contrast, these days we can, and sometimes do, consider sexual attraction to be primarily a quality of the one who feels attraction, rather than the one who is attractive.
If this is true, then the separation between subjective impression and the actuality of a thing has a serious moral dimension. It allows us to see that a person themselves may have an entirely different idea of what they mean and what they are, compared to our perception of them. It may not be coincidence that the scientific revolution happened alongside literary changes that slowly made more room for complex internal motivations. People are not just the impressions they produce upon us. They have their own internal lives and meanings.
From the article:
The quotes from medieval texts that I’ve seen pretty clearly go against the author’s interpretation here. For example:
https://www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/dweb/society/sex/sexual-desire.php