Facing the Image: Towards an Ethics of Seeing

Abstract

In a dialogue that concerns moderation and self-knowledge, Plato suggests that there could be a way of seeing that does not observe the object but focuses on our ways of seeing it. More accurately, Plato seems to suggest a vision of vision itself, a way of facing that makes what is seen into a mirror that returns the vision to itself. At the centre of the following discussion is the duality of facing the image: an image that we face and an image that faces back at us. We usually look at images for what they are, and examine what they represent or how they affect us. But we can also make the image look back by describing its capacity to awaken in us a way of seeing that is more reflexive, that places us as the agents of sight and hence as implicated by what we see.

Amit Pinchevski

- Suppose that there is a kind of vision which is not like ordinary vision, but a vision of itself and of other sorts of vision, and of the defect of them, which in seeing sees no colour, but only itself and other sorts of vision: Do you think that there is such a kind of vision?

- Certainly not.

Plato, Charmides