Find It New: Aspect-Perception and Modernist Ethics

Abstract

In an essay entitled ‘The Nobility of Sight’, Hans Jonas argues that ‘[s] ince the days of Greek philosophy sight has been recognized as the most excellent of senses’ (Jonas, 1954, p.507). Seeking to account for the historical elevation of vision over other forms of sensory engagement with the world, Jonas contends that ‘[t]he unique distinction of sight consists in what we may call the image performance, where “image” implies three characteristics: (1) simultaneity in the presentation of a manifold; (2) neutralization of the causality of sense-affection; (3) distance in the spatial and mental senses’ (ibid.). In the case of (1), what distinguishes sight from other senses is the fact that it can give us both dynamic and static reality: our eyes can survey a whole field of possible percepts as well as focus directly upon a fixed object (ibid., pp.508–9). In the case of (2), what further marks out vision is that it does not require the perceiver and the object of perception to be directly engaged — the ‘dynamic’ relation between the two is, in Jonas’ words, ‘neutralized’ (ibid., p.514). And in the case of (3), seeing’s inimitability is also guaranteed by its being ‘the only sense in which the advantage lies not in proximity but in distance: the best view is by no means the closest view’ (ibid., pp.517–8).

A philosopher says ‘Look at things like this!’ — but in the first place that doesn’t ensure that people will look at things like that, and in the second place his admonition may come altogether too late; it’s possible, moreover, that such an admonition can achieve nothing in any case and that the impetus for such a change in the way things are perceived has to originate somewhere else entirely.

(CV, 1980, p.62)

The eye has become a human eye, just as its object has become a social, human object… The forming of the five senses becomes a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present.

(Marx, 1959, pp.99, 101)