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Aesthetic and Ethical World Disclosure

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Seeing as Practice

Part of the book series: Performance Philosophy ((PPH))

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Abstract

What is seeing, when people see each other, when we are visible and being looked at? Human visibility is necessarily social visibility, since humans appear to each other, display themselves. With our partly involuntary and partly chosen outer image we show ourselves to the others and offer ourselves to be perceived by them. The performative dimension is here accounted for as an activity entailing realising and configuring effects that constitute self and world relations by means of perceptions and inner images. This leads to a discussion of the aesthetic freedom entailed by creative aspect-seeing and the ethical responsibilities involved in social visibility.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    D. Davidson (1984, p. 263): We are here not concerned with Davidson’s theory of metaphor and the epistemic problems it poses. Jens Kertscher (2004) convincingly argues that Davidson’s concept entails difficulties for his theory of interpretation. Samuel C. Wheeler III (2004) positively evaluates the theories of Wittgenstein and Davidson. By contrast, Joachim Schulte (1990) is sceptical.

  2. 2.

    On the comparison between the procedures of metaphor and aspect-seeing, see Marcus Hester (1966).

  3. 3.

    René Magritte must have been thinking of something like this when he distinguished between resemblance and similitude, characterising his painting as a procedure for producing unusual connections between heterogeneous things. Regine Prange (2001, p. 44) explains Magritte’s approach with reference to Foucault‘s ‘The Order of Thing’’ and his conception of similarity as the “Merging of thought and the world,” which can also be understood as “thinking seeing or seeing thought,[…] which generates certain affinities between things that remain hidden to everyday seeing.” Magritte embeds his concept of resemblance in a somewhat adventurous and unsupported theory of the “mystery.” See K. Lüdeking (1996).

  4. 4.

    On this point, see also C. Scherer (2001).

  5. 5.

    See K. Jaspers (1994), who divided world views [Weltanschauungen] into sensible-spatial, psychic-cultural and metaphysical.

  6. 6.

    Also interesting is: M. Pines (1985).

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  1. Otto-von-Guericke University, Magdeburg, Germany

    Eva Schuermann

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Schuermann, E. (2019). Aesthetic and Ethical World Disclosure. In: Seeing as Practice. Performance Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14507-1_7

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