Sight and the Ancient Senses

Michael Squire, Michael Squire

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317515371
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

It is to Greek critical thinking about seeing that we owe our conceptual framework for theorizing the senses, and it is also to such thinking that we owe the lasting legacy of Greco-Roman imagery. Sight and the Ancient Senses is the first thorough introduction to the conceptualization of sight in the history, visual culture, literature and philosophy of classical antiquity. Examining how the Greeks and Romans interpreted what they saw, the collection also considers sight in relation to the other senses.

This volume brings together a number of interdisciplinary perspectives to deliver a broad and balanced coverage of this subject. Contributors explore the cultural, social and intellectual backdrops that gave rise to ancient theories of seeing, from Archaic Greece through to the advent of Christianity in late antiquity. This series of specially commissioned thematic chapters demonstrate how theories about sight informed Graeco-Roman philosophy, science, poetry rhetoric and art. The collection also reaches beyond its Graeco-Roman visual framework, showcasing how ancient ideas have influenced the longue durée of western sensory thinking. Richly illustrated throughout, including a section of color plates, Sight and the Ancient Senses is a wide-ranging introduction to ancient theories of seeing which will be an invaluable resource for students and scholars of classical antiquity.

1
Sight and the Presocratics

Approaches to visual perception in early Greek philosophy

Kelli Rudolph

This chapter introduces the earliest Greek philosophical thinking about the eye, visual perception and its relationship to sensory knowledge more generally. It deals with the so-called “Presocratic” tradition – that is, with philosophers between the early sixth and late fifth centuries BCE.¹ My aim is twofold: first, to explore the interconnected explanations used by these early thinkers to make sense of seeing in the Archaic and early Classical Greek world; and second, to show how the earliest traditions set a course for the subsequent development of theorizing “sight and the ancient senses”. The two chapters that immediately follow take up this chronological structure: on the one hand, Andrea Nightingale charts the intellectual history of conceptualizing sight in later Classical philosophical traditions (focussing on Plato and Aristotle); on the other hand, Reviel Netz & Michael Squire move from (what we label) Greek “philosophy” to “science”, probing the subsequent field of “optics” in the Greek and Roman worlds.

Presocratic theories of vision start out from a set of fundamental assumptions about the components of sight. Yet, as we shall see, their thinking results in a variety of approaches to the visual process. In what follows, I categorize these theories under three broad headings: first, those which understand vision as something akin to a form of reflection; second, those that approach vision as an “intromissionist” process, in which images or effluences from an external object enter the eye; and third, various “extramissionist” ideas about vision, whereby rays from the eye stream towards visible objects. In each case, early Greek philosophers adopt arguments from analogy to explain the origin of things and the processes of nature, adapting those arguments to suit a visual context.² To

explain how vision occurs, Presocratic thinkers draw on a combination of common experiences, ranging from reflections in water or seal impressions in wax, to novel developments in painting, such as “shadow-painting” (skiagraphia) and “scene-painting” (skēnographia).³ Such explanations reveal an intimate connection between philosophical and artistic approaches to the problems of representation at the end of the sixth and during the fifth century BCE. For philosophers, such concerns are marked explicitly by attempts to explain variations in the accuracy and reliability of sight.

Although my primary interest in what follows centres on early Greek theories of sight and the reasoning and arguments used to establish them, it is nonetheless important to emphasize the contexts within which these ideas both arose and have come down to modern readers, since in its earliest form philosophy encompassed what today are the separate fields of physics, biology, psychology, theology and politics (to name a few). After outlining the difficulties we face when attempting to reconstruct Presocratic theories about the senses in the chapter’s first section, I then turn to Alcmaeon (fl. 500–450 BCE) and Anaxagoras (500–428/7 BCE), who both liken vision to reflection. As I demonstrate, this development represents a break from the extramissionist accounts of the earlier poetic tradition, in which a ray leaves the eye and alights upon an object. In the third section of the chapter, I move to the intellectual innovations of Empedocles (ca. 495–435 BCE), often associated with an intromissionist theory of sight, involving emanations leaving an object and entering the perceiver’s eye. For Empedocles these emanations arise from the interaction of light and darkness in the elemental form of fire and water. Finally, I turn to the last of the Presocratics – a younger contemporary of Socrates named Democritus (ca. 460–370 BCE), who combines elements of earlier theories in order to relate vision to the environmental factors that separate us from the objects we see. In many ways, Democritus’ complex visual theory is the culmination of the philosophical concerns about variation in the visual experience in early Greek philosophy. As Andrea Nightingale explores in the following chapter, moreover, Democritus’ approach also sets the scene for Classical Greek ideas about sight and the senses – and, by extension, the longer history of western intellectual thinking.

Reconstructing “Presocratic philosophy”

While numerous theories of perception emerge between the beginning of the sixth and the end of the fifth centuries BCE, this chapter focusses on those we label “Presocratic”. This is a modern classification that largely follows the Platonic and Aristotelian accounts of Greek intellectual development insofar as it refers to those thinkers whose work does not show the influence of Socrates or “Socratic” thinking.⁴ Such an approach inevitably leaves aside theories put forward by doctors, poets and those teachers of rhetoric and politics that Plato pejoratively refers to as the “sophists”. However, it brings together a group of thinkers who abandon mythological explanations and who are primarily concerned with giving real causal explanations for the origins and processes of nature; it is in this sense that we call such thinking “philosophy”.

As with many of the authors from this period, the views of Presocratic philosophers are hard to interpret. In part, this is because the remains of their works are themselves fragmentary. Yet even when we have the author’s own words, the terminology is often difficult to understand, since comparative uses are sometimes non-existent or unhelpful. In the past, scholars tended to focus on reconstructing the exact words of these thinkers insofar as they could be extracted as direct quotations from our sources.⁵ Current trends in Presocratic scholarship now also emphasize the reports and the contexts within which quotations are embedded, in order to elucidate elements of Presocratic thought for which direct quotations do not survive. This latter approach is especially valuable to anyone interested in theories of perception, since we are almost entirely reliant on reports, or testimonia, of earlier opinions preserved in the works of much later – usually Aristotelian – authors, who may have had access to the Presocratic texts themselves. Thus, Theophrastus (ca. 372–287 BCE) will figure as an important interlocutor throughout this chapter, not only because his treatise On the Senses provides the lens through which later “doxo-graphical” writers view Presocratic theories of perception, but also because he is among our earliest critical sources for Presocratic theories of perception.⁶

Presocratic theorizing about the senses arises within the context of all-encompassing theories about the world and the place of humanity within it. Because these thinkers were concerned broadly with questions about the origin and nature of things, their inquiries extend to questions about mathematics and the movement of the planets, biology and the formation and structure of human and animal bodies, ethics and the nature of the gods, metaphysics, i.e. the place of matter, form and structure in the world, as well as the nature of explanation and human understanding, what we call epistemology. Thus, the areas of study that today are separated into the fields of philosophy, science and medicine were in antiquity closely linked. We will see the extent to which these areas of inquiry overlap in the theories of vision we find in Alcmaeon and Anaxagoras, Empedocles and Democritus.

Sight and reflections in Alcmaeon (fl. 500–450 BCE) and Anaxagoras (500–428/7 BCE)

Alcmaeon of Croton, one of the earliest Greek theorists to consider human physiology, was active between 500 and 450 BCE. Like all Presocratics, he was writing before the emergence of clear disciplinary distinctions between philosophy, science and medicine.⁷ Alcmaeon is the first to suggest the central role of the brain for thought: on the basis of the connection between the eye and the optical nerve, he argues that the senses were connected to the brain via channels or pores.⁸ So far as we know, Alcmaeon is also the first to theorize the cause of sight. Although his own writings do not survive, Theophrastus reports his opinion as follows:⁹

ὀφθαλμοὺς δὲ ὁρᾶν διὰ τοῦ πέριξ ὕδατος. ὅτι δ’ ἔχει πῦρ δῆλον εἶναι· πληγέντος

γὰρ ἐκλάμπειν. ὁρᾶν δὲ τῷ στίλβοντι καὶ τῷ διαφανεῖ, ὅταν ἀντιφαίνῃ, καὶ ὅσον

ἂν καθαρώτερον ᾖ μᾶλλον.

The eyes see through the surrounding water. That the eye has fire is clear, for when struck, the fire shines out. Vision is due to the gleaming (i.e. the transparent), whenever it reflects; to whatever extent it [i.e. the reflection] is more clear, seeing is better.

Alcmaeon’s account of the fire in the eye incorporates traditional notions of vision found in poetry. The eye was considered – from the very earliest Greek writings known to us – to be an active, fire-emitting organ, akin to the all-seeing sun. We find this thinking, for example, in the Homeric Hymns and in Pindar, where the sun’s ray (aktis) is referred to as the “mother of eyes”.¹⁰ In many of our earliest sources, including Homer and Hesiod, the eye is active, with rays that beam forth or flash fire.¹¹ The “fiery eye” is such a powerful trope that it is a mainstay in both poetic and technical (philosophic and medical) accounts of vision throughout the Archaic and Classical periods.¹²

Alcmaeon’s account combines this poetic representation of the fiery eye with details culled from everyday observation. Although seemingly simple, the resulting explanation shows close observation of the eye.¹³ Alcmaeon describes the surrounding water, which is presumably the lachrymal fluid that keeps our eyes clean and lubricated. Additionally, he gives details of the observation of the pupil, on the gleaming surface of which an image is reflected. Moreover, as is clear from the passage above, Alcmaeon reports the outcome of an experimental prodding of the eye as a demonstration of its internal fire.¹⁴ It is these observations that set Alcmaeon’s account apart as the first attempt at an empirical theory of vision. However, we must ask to what extent Alcmaeon is justified in his conclusion that “vision is due to the gleaming, whenever it reflects”, and in his judgement that sight is better when the reflection in the surface is clearer.

Setting aside Theophrastus’ later peripatetic gloss of gleaming (stilbos) as transparent (diaphanēs), it is clear that Alcmaeon is describing the mirror-like qualities of the eye, since the ancient Greek term stilbos is used regularly to describe highly reflective surfaces like those of water, oil or metal.¹⁵ Like these objects, the eye throws back reflections, but such reflection is only called “vision” when the image itself is seen in (the literal meaning of the Greek, emphasis) the eye. Alcmaeon may here be attempting to explain why we have difficulty seeing in the dark, since dark objects are not as easily reflected in the pupil of the eye as light objects.

Alcmaeon further delimits sight by stipulating the conditions for the success of the visual act. Since “vision” in the Theophrastus passage cited above refers to the process of seeing, it is either the purity (katharōteros) of the gleamin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of illustations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introductory reflections: making sense of ancient sight
• 1 Sight and the Presocratics: approaches to visual perception in early Greek philosophy
• 2 Sight and the philosophy of vision in Classical Greece: Democritus, Plato and Aristotle
• 3 Sight and the perspectives of mathematics: the limits of ancient optics
• 4 Sight and reflexivity: theorizing vision in Greek vase-painting
• 5 Sight and painting: optical theory and pictorial poetics in Classical Greek art
• 6 Sight and light: reified gazes and looking artefacts in the Greek cultural imagination
• 7 Sight and death: seeing the dead through ancient eyes
• 8 Sight and the gods: on the desire to see naked nymphs
• 9 Sight and memory: the visual art of Roman mnemonics
• 10 Sight and insight: theorizing vision, emotion and imagination in ancient rhetoric
• 11 Sight and Christianity: early Christian attitudes to seeing
• 12 Sight and blindness: the mask of Thamyris
• 13 Sight in retrospective: the afterlife of ancient optics
• Bibliography
• Index
• Plates