A chapter from an interesting book now available in its entirety online -- David Michael Levin,
The Philosopher's Gaze: Modernity in the Shadows of Enlightenment, New Edition
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book description at amazon: "David Michael Levin's ongoing exploration of the moral character and enlightenment-potential of vision takes a new direction in The Philosopher's Gaze. Levin examines texts by Descartes, Husserl, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Benjamin, Merleau-Ponty, and Lévinas, using our culturally dominant mode of perception and the philosophical discourse it has generated as the site for his critical reflections on the moral culture in which we are living.
In Levin's view, all these philosophers attempted to understand, one way or another, the distinctive pathologies of the modern age. But every one also attempted to envision—if only through the faintest of traces, traces of mutual recognition, traces of another way of looking and seeing—the prospects for a radically different lifeworld. The world, after all, inevitably reflects back to us the character, the reach and range, of our vision.
In these provocative essays, the author draws on the language of hermeneutical phenomenology and at the same time refines phenomenology itself as a method of working with our experience and thinking critically about the culture in which we live."}
The Discursive Construction of the Philosophical Gaze
In the Phaedo , Plato writes that Socrates must "be careful not to suffer the misfortune that befalls people who look at and observe the sun during an eclipse. For people may harm their eyesight unless they look at its image
reflected in water or in some similar medium."[
1] But he also meant, allegorically, a danger even greater, in a sense, than the one that could befall one blinded by the sun: the danger, namely, that befalls one who is spellbound by shadows, reflections, and images—the illusions that hold our gaze in the material world. Thus the affirmation of a turning-away, decisive for the philosophical gaze: "I thought of that danger, and I was afraid that my soul would be blinded if I looked at things
with my eyes or tried to apprehend them with any of my senses. So I thought I must have recourse to
and examine in them the truth
of beings."[
2] In this testimony, Plato remarks the distinctively philosophical movement (a conversion, or turning, a
of vision—the progression from the activity of eyes obsessed with and entangled in the visible world to a contemplative, theoretical vision dedicated to knowledge of the Forms, timeless, eternal Ideas visible only to the discursive intellect of the rational psyche.
For Plato, to see the Forms of the Good and the True is to know the Forms of the Good and the True. And to know these Forms, one cannot help but be morally good and care about (care for, love) the truth. In The Republic , Socrates addresses his interlocutor, saying:
"For surely, Adeimantus, the man whose mind is truly fixed on eternal realities has no leisure to turn his eyes downward upon the petty affairs of men, engaging in such strife with them that he becomes full of envy and hate, but fixes his gaze upon the things of the eternal and unchanging order, and seeing that they neither wrong nor are wronged by one another, but all exist in harmony as reason bids, he will endeavour to imitate them, and, in so far as possible, to form himself in their likeness and assimilate himself to them. Or do you think it possible not to imitate the things to which anyone attaches himself with admiration? (Book VI, 500b–c)"
Commenting on this passage, Charles Taylor writes that "reason reaches its fulness in the vision of the larger order, which is also a vision of the Good. . . . Once reason is substantively defined, once a correct vision of the order is criterial to rationality, then our becoming rational ought not most perspicuously to be described as something that takes place in[side] us, but rather better as our connecting up to the larger order in which we are placed."[
3]
This conversion of vision involves a certain ascent: obedient to the axis that connects earth and sky, the dialectical movement that begins with two eyes caught in the confusion of the sensuous, material life of the world and ends in the asceticism of the philosopher's monothetic, contemplative gaze, fixed on, and also fixed by, the immutable Forms, begins well with the humility of a gaze looking up at the stars: "for I conceive that, as the eyes are designed to look up at the stars, so are the ears to hear harmonious motions" (Republic , book VII, 530).
In his
Critique of Practical Reason, Immanuel Kant invokes the stars to evoke, to awaken, the moral sensibility:
"Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. I do not merely conjecture them and seek them as though obscured in darkness or in the transcendent region beyond my horizon: I see them before me, and I associate them directly with the consciousness of my own existence.[
4]"
What must be the effect, then, of the ever increasing hiddenness—or, say, withdrawal—of the starry heavens and the horizon? Kant's words are provocative, calling for a critical look at our contemporary life-world. This is a world in which, increasingly, our city lights and industrial pollution shut out the light of the stars, while our tall city buildings and hurried way of living keep us alienated from the incommensurability that is the measure of the horizon. In contrast to the life Kant knew in eighteenth-century Königsberg, our lives of today are no longer measured by the height of the stars and the depth of the horizon. How then can the character of the philosopher's vision be tried and measured, challenged and questioned?
For Plato, the contemplative vision of the philosopher, a "perception" of the absolute Good and the absolute Truth, can initially be understood, however, only in terms of an analogy that depends on an understanding of the perception of sensuous Forms (Republic , book VII, 532). Unlike the worldly knowledge we achieve with eyes still attached to the earth, the knowledge achieved by the philosopher's gaze is a knowledge free of images, shadows, reflections: it is a knowledge free of all sensuous and material limitations, and it is a knowledge free of perspectivism and its "distortions," grasped all at once and once and for all (book VI, 500–11).
For philosophers from Plato to Descartes, Hobbes, and Locke, the philosopher's vision is an expression of the "natural light" of reason (Republic , book VII, 532). This light is an inner light, generated by the power of reason. Emotions are said to be dark and confusing, but reason sheds its light on things and leads us to clarity and enlightenment. If, as Plato says (at Republic, book VI, 508), light is the "noble bond" between sight and the visible world, gracefully withdrawing from notice into the invisibility of a condition taken for granted, the light of reason is that which binds us to the ideality of a vision exceeding the visible in its reach and range, a vision that can never be satisfied with what has taken place within the realm of the visible.
This light of reason, once, long ago, a manifestation of the joy attending an indwelling sense of divinity and imaged as the aura or aureole that surrounds the head, but now too reduced, too secular, too subjective, too disenchanted, to be experienced and rendered in this way, now takes nothing for granted—unless this be the event of the gift of light itself, that light by grace of which a field of visibility is first opened up for the projective activity of vision. Today, having repudiated the light of this wondrous event as mythic nonsense and extinguished the inner light of reason in the brightness of mere metaphor, vision must now pass through a medium it can only understand in the languages of physics, optics, and biochemistry, focusing on the objects made visible by the event of a gift it ignores.
In "Philosophy and the Crisis of European Man," Edmund Husserl said: "Man becomes the disinterested spectator [uninteressierter Zuschauer ], overseer of the world; in other words, he becomes a philosopher."[
5] For Plato and Aristotle, the philosopher's gaze must be disciplined; it must be steadied in a calm and dispassionate state. As Plato says in the Meno , to be steady in virtue, reliably disposed, to know what virtue is, one needs a "steady" gaze.[
6] But it is not only a question of steadying the gaze; its object too must be such that a steady, calm, dispassionate gaze is possible. Thus the object must be an ideal Form, timeless and unchanging. Only then can the gaze participate in the world of perception and be a guide to virtuous action.
This ascetic philosophical gaze, informed by a theoretical fixation on the Forms, has today, of course, lost its compass: the Forms have been swept away by the winds of subjectivity, cynical if not skeptical about the claims of objective reason. Without its proper object, such a gaze vanishes, probably forever, leaving the traces of its once glorious sovereignty only in the dark ink of letters that now, contrary to original intention, can only mourn and commemorate its historically fated passage.
The gaze of today makes its way through a thoroughly disenchanted landscape, attentive only to the objects at the end of its immediate interests. We take its measure not by the bounds of the horizon, nor by the boundless depths of the beyond, into which the horizon opens, but by the calculated ratios of loss and gain. The glitter of false gold, the dazzling display of civilization's latest instruments and commodities, the ornaments of material culture, hold the gaze in their power, blinding it to the suffering that demands the light and the darkness of truth, that by grace of which alone all our ways of seeing are first made possible. Lost in the subjectivity of perspectivism, we lose all perspective on our lives. We are easily distracted by our obsessions, the objects they inhabit rendered visible according to the laws of desire and an economy of illusory promises.
To the extent that the world is as it is in correspondence to the character of our vision, to the extent that the world is as it is as a function of this vision, its projection and reflection, one way to change the world would be to change the way we see things. Perhaps no one has articulated this point with more eloquence than Michel Foucault. In an interview subsequently given the title "Questions of Method," Foucault said: "My project is to contribute to changing certain things in people's ways of perceiving and doing things, to participate in this difficult displacement of forms of sensibility and thresholds of tolerance."[
7] And in The Use of Pleasure , he wrote: "There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all."[
8]
In his
Ethics, Spinoza formulated as a proposition of some importance the thought that "the more capable the body is of being affected in many ways, and affecting external bodies in many ways, the more capable of thinking is the mind."[
9] All the commentaries by philosophers have ignored the implicitly radical significance of this proposition: the necessary implication of the body in the transformations that would constitute the "improvement" or enlightenment of the mind. All the commentaries have concentrated their attention on the capability and enlargement of the mind. But the strict parallelism that obtains between intellect and body means that, for every alteration of the mind, there must be a corresponding alteration of the body. And there is no reason to suppose that alterations of the body must be conceptualized only from the standpoint of the mind.
Suppose, then, the possibility of a more enlightened, more ethically capable embodiment. What would this involve? What would it be like? How, for example, might we conceive a vision more capable of being affected in many ways, and affecting external bodies in many ways? How might a gaze with an historically different character be brought into being, preparing, perhaps, for the advent of a new epoch, a new beginning for humanity, and for the entire world of our beholding?
Borrowing one of Hegel's numerous "heliotropes," vision-generated, vision-saturated tropes especially frequent in his thinking about the philosophy of history, we may want now to ask ourselves how—in so far as it is within the reach and range of our present historical capabilities—we would like to, and actually might, alter the (intentional) character of our vision, to "greet together the dawn of a better time."[
10]
Since the time of its beginning, Western philosophy has been a philosophy of light, vision, and enlightenment. Its principal methods have been intuition, reflection, speculation, and insight, while evidence has served as its measure of truth, and clear and distinct ideas have represented its objective. Moreover, in the discourse itself, metaphors drawn from light and vision have figured in ways that cannot always be eliminated by substitution without altering truth or meaning. This connection between philosophical thought and discourse has recently been subjected to critical questioning. To a considerable extent, the stimulus for such questioning has come, I think, from the so-called linguistic turn in philosophy, which has obliged philosophers to turn their critical reflection onto the rhetorical features of philosophical discourse, its own ways of using language, and its hitherto unexamined assumptions about the relationship between writing and thought. The turn to language must be situated, however, within a much larger narrative. If it has unquestionably been stimulated by new technologies and a revolution in the forms of communication that is releasing ever new potentials, it has also been promoted by new conditions of social life—multiculturalism, ethnic diversity, and other forms of social heterogeneity, which have made it necessary for democracies to improve the processes and procedures of social recognition and communication on which the legitimacy and effectiveness of their political institutions ultimately depend.
To be sure, the philosophical gaze is no longer turned away from the world, directed upon the timeless essences of an absolute, objective order. Nor is it obsessed with a movement of radical transcendence, be this a new theology, a new theodicy, or even the image of a future utopia. But the return of the gaze to the immanence of worldly matters, its inevitable subjective turn, acknowledging its historicity, its situatedness, its relativity, its finitude, has not been an easy transition. Deprived of the theoretical objectivity it once enjoyed, deprived of the omniscience and omnipotence it once could claim, denied the benefit of radical transcendence, how can the philosopher's gaze continue its critical function? How can it assume a position of authority? How can it justify a claim to truth? What happens to this gaze when it is reduced to perception, taking place without higher refuge in the midst of the commonplace? And in the name of what more enlightened potential for vision can the philosopher undertake the rational reconstruction of ordinary sight? How can the philosopher justify programs for the reform of visual perception, making it less susceptible to illusion and deception—or at least more guarded, more cautious in its claims?
In The Social Contract, Jean-Jacques Rousseau indicates how important it is that citizens learn to "see objects as they are, and sometimes as they ought to appear."[11] How, then, can the philosopher address our perception, so that we see through ideological distortions, recognize the power plays behind false appearances for what they really are, and subject the political processes of democracy to the public scrutiny that keeps them open and honest? How can the critical method of dialectical thinking be embodied in looking, seeing, and observing?
In Minima Moralia, Adorno remarks that "knowledge must indeed present the fatally rectilinear succession of victory and defeat, but should also address itself to those things which were not embraced by this dynamic, which fell by the wayside—what might be called the waste products and blind spots that have escaped the dialectic. . . . What transcends the ruling society is not only the potentiality it develops but also all that which did not fit properly into the laws of historical movement."[12] (Foucault's peculiar optics could be read as continuing precisely this project.) Overcoming blind spots recalls a thesis that Karl Marx advanced in his 1844 manuscripts: "The cultivation of the five senses is the work of all previous history."[13] Marx argued there that "sense which is subservient to crude needs has only a restricted meaning. . . . Thus, the objective realization of the human essence, both theoretically and practically, is necessary in order to humanize man's senses, and also to create the human senses corresponding to all the wealth of human and natural being."[14]
The present book, continuing the project I began in
The Opening of Vision, is intended as a contribution to the philosophical understanding of what is involved in the cultivation of sensibility and the humanization of the senses. What is needed is [1] the theoretical reconstruction of the enlightenment potential in our naturally bestowed capacity for vision and [2] the equally important theoretical reconstruction of the historico-cultural conditions in which these capacities, the gift of nature, were or were not permitted realization, development, and fulfillment. The second task requires that we think about the perceptivity of our vision from the standpoint of a certain
Leidensgeschichte, a history that brings to light the traces of suffering and violence. For
what is in question, what is at stake, here, is ultimately the moral disposition and character of our way of seeing—the humanization of the natural eye. Thus, what is needed is a philosophical critique of our capacity to see and of the way of seeing by which, for the most part, we actually live our lives: an undertaking in many ways like the philosophical project that Jürgen Habermas articulated in his appendix to Knowledge and Human Interests , except that, instead of the redemption of dialogue, it is a question of the redemption of vision as a cultural inheritance. Here is what Habermas says:
"Only when philosophy discovers in the dialectical course of history the traces of violence that deform repeated attempts at dialogue and recurrently close off the path to unconstrained communication does it further the process whose suspension it otherwise legitimates: mankind's evolution toward autonomy and responsibility. My fifth thesis is thus that the unity of knowledge and interest proves itself in a dialectic that takes the historical traces of suppressed dialogue and reconstructs what has been suppressed .[15]"
In a sense, this is a task that calls for a critical theory of collective memory, a re-collection (anamnesis ) of what our culture has refused to recognize and to see. With nature's gift of sight comes a certain calling—and the pressure of a normativity grounded only in the gift of nature itself. Through this calling, we are enjoined to take historical responsibility for our ability to be responsive.
In a note to one of the letters written for
On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Friedrich Schiller asks us to consider:
"How can we be fair, kindly and humane towards others, let our maxims be as praiseworthy as they may be, if we lack the capacity to make strange natures genuinely and truly a part of ourselves, appropriate strange situations, make strange feelings our own?[
16]"
Keeping in mind the time of these letters—for otherwise we might worry about the operation of a certain quite subtle form of egoism, even in this benevolent thought—I want to say that I appreciate the question that Schiller poses. It is, however, ambiguous. I will argue that we have already been given a certain rudimentary corporeal schematization of this capacity and are therefore, in this sense, not without it. But the documents of a repeated barbarism that our civilization has failed to overcome make it impossible to deny, when we interrogate the archives of thought, that the philosopher's elevated gaze has done little to clarify and exhibit its potential, bringing before our vision a different way of being with others.
The present book is an attempt to call attention to our perceptive capabilities and examine the historical prospects in the light of their promise. To this end, the chapters of this book will be reflecting on the different forms of the gaze as they figure in the thinking of some important philosophers.
Although the chapters are united by their commitment to a certain critical point of view and are sequenced according to a certain argumentative logic, they may nevertheless be profitably read, I believe, quite independently of this order.
The Philosopher's Gaze
