âThe concept of âseeingâ makes a tangled impression. Well, it is tangled.â (Ludwig Wittgenstein 1986, 200).
This book investigates the power of vision in terms of its structure and its modes of operation. Everyone sees from an individual perspective, from a unique location in space and in their own particular way. We can nevertheless communicate tolerably well amongst each other concerning what we see. Seeing is both a proven means of orientation, of acquiring information and of interacting with others, and at the same time a personality-specific way of perceiving reality conditioned by individual and cultural variations. Neither modes of seeing can be fully explained by our knowledge of retinal and neuronal processing (physiology) or by empirical Gestalt theory (psychology). In general, a type of constative seeing that is regarded as the least problematic instance of epistemic perception, whereas all more complex cases of seeing something as something are regarded in terms of interpretative or metaphorical reference to the seen.
Philosophy has been primarily interested in vision as a means of obtaining knowledge, and philosophical approaches have always oscillated between objectivist and subjectivist views. In the former, perception is conceived either as a causally determined representation of the outside world, or simply understood in terms of physiological stimulus response. The latter view characterises the seeing subject as the autonomous constructor of their own world, thereby removing emphasis from any historically and culturally productive, yet contingent, freedom within seeing. Both versions impose significant restrictions on understanding what seeing could be. The objectivist approach fails to take mediation into account, while the subjectivist approach, in so far as it fails to acknowledge history and culture, is somewhat solipsistic. Too much, and also too little, is asked both of the seeing person and the polyvalent visible, i.e. of consciousness and the world. Again, the objectivist interpretation is unable to explain the variations and divergences in individual perception; it does not account for why everyone sees differently, why visible things can be overlooked, and why we always see both more and less than what is there to be seen. Similarly, the subjectivist conception cannot plausibly explain the degree of intersubjective convergence between my personal perception and that of others. Although everything physical within a given space is visible physiologically, not everything in such a view is noticed and seen in accord with the way others see it. It follows that seeing is neither perceiving the pure representation of a physically present world, nor the pure construction of an individual viewpoint, although it nevertheless contains aspects of both. To understand vision as simply recognition in terms of replicating reality, the visible as merely objective presence, is to ignore the generative capacity and the relative nature of the faculty of vision.
A philosophical theory of perception needs to engage with the tension at the core of a perceptual world that is both socially shared and private. It also needs to determine the relation between sense and sensibility, sight and insight, seeing and ways of seeing. As an activity of consciousness, seeing is interconnected with other mental acts of representation and judgement, with affective dispositions of hoping, desiring, fearing, as well as with temporal referencing in memory and expectation. This would be difficult to explain if seeing were solely a means of attaining knowledge. A second problem to resolve consists thereby in the relation of perception to thinking and believing, to representation and imagination, to constative and interpretive acts.
A third difficulty is posed by the diversity of forms of seeing. Any attempt to understand seeing must take into account a multiplicity of uses and contexts of use that are peculiar to visual perception. This multiplicity undermines or relativises the paradigm of seeing as recognition and predication, and recasts the form of visual perception par excellence as only one aspect of a set of multiform variations and modalities of perceptual relation to the world: the scientific researcherâs gaze, the meaningful speaking gaze and the pensive lost gaze each disclose a particular sphere of the visible. The interpersonal gaze occurs as an event through which the self is mirrored back as it appears to the other.
The relation between the viewer and the visible must consequently be considered within an entirely different interpretive framework. If preconceptions about vision and visibility are indeed presupposed, then seeing is understood as a means of accessing the world that provides knowledge and conclusions about things sensibly present in the world. I want to depart from this preconception to arrive at a more finely nuanced description of what happens when someone sees. Neither empiricist sense data theories nor constructivist theories of vision are sufficient tools in themselves to conceptually grasp the uniquely protean predisposition of the faculty of vision, situated as it is between consciousness and world, construction and representation, interpretation and response, state and action. There is good reason to regard seeing as a contextually situated and intersubjective activity, i.e. action that engenders or generates something.
1 Two Cases of Perceptual World Disclosure
What parents do when they look at their child with a gaze that conveys the warning: âcareful now, donât push it,â is an âactâ that cannot be described and understood solely in terms of an epistemic or representational notion of perception. Such explanatory schemes are even less appropriate for grasping what the infant does when it sees that its parents are angry. By looking at their child, the parents perform illocutionary acts of communication; they do something by seeing. The infant in turn performs, by seeing, an act of sense disclosure. If this occurrence is separated out into sensory impulse reception on the basis of light waves on the one hand, and interpretive attribution of meaning on the other, the result is to obstruct any understanding of it as a meaningful and successful integral act. Epistemic elements may indeed be involved in this type of seeing; for instance, the parents may ârecogniseâ that their child is behaving badly or the child may have the âinsightâ that its parents are offended by something. Nonetheless, this is not simply a case of understanding occasioned by the sense of sight, but rather of meaning accomplished by shared, perceptive world disclosure. The infant is confronted with what it is, literally, in the eyes of its parents. The encounter is literal and not metaphorical because it becomes noticeable first and foremost aistheticallyâthat is, sensorially. It involves interpersonal perceptions that the participants have of each other, which prompt them to do what they doâto reprove, to feel bad, to conform or to rebel.
A further example of the multi-layered character of aisthesis is the type of seeing characterised by Petrarchâs ascent of Mont Ventoux, in which seeing became an aesthetic perception and end in itselfâin Petrarchâs case the perception of landscape. Regardless of how constructed this episode of European cultural history may be, no one would have declared Petrarchâs journey in 1336 to indicate an epochal turn in the European perception of landscape had his initial act of perception been merely the result of his mirroring re-cognition of an objectively given world.
The main reason his account of the ascent to the summit could lead to philosophical-historical and speculative reconstructions was that it expressed a fundamental change of orientation and offered a new perceptual paradigm. To climb a mountain just âto see what so great an elevation had to offerâ (Petrarca 1898, p. 308, cursive ES) marks a break with the instrumentalist semantics of seeing. Giving himself over to the contemplation of the landscape, Petrarchâs describes his state thus: âowing to the unaccustomed quality of the air and the effect of the great sweep of view spread out before me, I stood like one dazedâ (ibid., p. 313). His case exemplifies an important distinction, namely that between seeing for the pleasure and emotion of it and seeing for some ulterior purpose in everyday life.
Petrarchâs example also makes it possible to understand how sight and insight, aisthetic and theoretical vision1 can merge into one another. The poet does not linger long before the sight of the French Alps in the clouds; his enjoyment of the view soon is transformed into theoretical reflection on the divine order of the world. An activity with a purely aesthetic end can in this way develop into philosophical contemplation because observation is a Janus-headed activity directed neither purely outwards nor inwards but instead always involving âparallel actions.â The sentience of seeing cannot be separated from its capacity to generate meaning.
Petrarchâs sight of the panorama is immediately accompanied by qualms about admiring the terrestrial.2 After having begun his descent, he writes, âI was satisfied that I had seen enough of the mountain; I turned my inward eye upon myselfâ (Petrarca 1898, p. 317). He thus provides an excellent example of the seeing subject as at once bios praktikos and theoretikos, at once active and contemplative. The intelligible character of sightâin its more than merely metaphorical proximity to insight and to processes of understandingâdoes not contradict its status as activity. The act of observation is simultaneously a sensorial exercise and also a type of semantic production that generates particular ways of seeing.
These two examplesâthe ethical3 significance of interactive seeing and reciprocal visibility and the transition from aesthetic to contemplative observationâare sufficient to suggest that seeing is not adequately conceptualised when subjected to either realist or constructivist interpretation. The present investigation probes an alternative view of the problem by following the assumption that seeing is a practice and more specifically a performative practice entailing epistemic, ethical and aesthetic disclosure of the world. As a philosophical concept, practice has implications that permit seeing to be released from a subject-object schema. The term world disclosure designates a relation to self and to world involving understanding and interpretation. The claim is that visual perception is a performative practice with a world disclosing function similar to that of speech.
The term world disclosure refers not to a marginal aesthetic phenomenon within social practice. The example of visual communication between parents and children already indicates the existential significance of a world disclosing interpretation, including an ethical dimension. Just as world disclosure can be analysed, according to a Platonic and Kantian tripartite division, into a cognitive, an aesthetic and an ethical dimension, it can also be separated into linguistic and perceptually conditioned elements. Seeing can become world disclosure as the means by which we attain self-development and understanding of the world. This activity has a conventional dimension conditioning what we expect to see and are normatively expected (by society) to see. The individual dimension consists in creative displacements of common ways of perceiving something. In each of these cases, it is a question of a mediating relation in which opposites are yoked together into a more complex unity.
Just as Wittgenstein showed that spoken language consists of language games, forms of life and world disclosure, in a similar way the use of sight can be understood as eye witnessing, forms of life and world disclosure. Although the term forms of life is characteristically undefined in Wittgenstein, it can be understood as the practical character of seeing. Forms of life are the rule-giving context of possible experience, thought and action in a given society at a given time. They are the unquestioned given that must be accepted (Wittgenstein 1986, p. 200). Although collective conventions of seeing do not have the same status as fixed terms within a discursive language game, they too adhere to well-rehearsed interpretive schemata and are prefigured in the totality of valid norms and dominant mores. As such, they are additional constituents within the form of life of a cultural community.
It can be said that forms of life influence perception like coloured or magnifying glasses. In the same way, a general practice involving habitual ways of seeing and social visibility determines how something becomes visible and what it will be seen as.
A theoretical difficulty naturally arises here, since the lens itself cannot be taken in visually, at least not while it is being looked through. Forms of life are, like images of the world, the dispositional, implicit horizon of speech and perception that is never viewed in itself, although it is always part of the act of viewing. Nonetheless, in a theory of perception instructed by Wittgensteinâs theory of language as usage, his insights can be applied to the use of the sense of sight; seeing is a practice embedded in a form of life, just as speech is. The context for this social sharing of a perceptual world is the entirety of historically and socially, publicly and institutionally recognised customs as well as dominant beliefs, interests and claims. The concept of p...