Abstract
This chapter elicits the problems that have arisen from splitting seeing into receptivity on the one hand and intellectual spontaneity on the other. It explores possible alternative theoretical approaches. Seeing as a way of disclosing the apparent, perceptible world cannot be explained in purely either physiological or cognitive terms. Specific to the faculty of seeing is its proximity to processes of understanding, thinking and interpreting. When someone notices something in someone else, they are not merely decoding certain sensory signs, but seeing and understanding at the same time. Sight and insight, seeing and ways of seeing are therefore intertwined in a way that needs to be explained against the background of an entirely different theoretical framework.
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Notes
- 1.
Ralf Konersmann (1997, p. 23) has provided a lucid description of the contradictions inherent to both valorisations and devaluations of the faculty of vision: “Although Platonic-biblical thinking visualised the logos, the history of the ocular sense was not triumphal. The consistent intellectualist demand has been to deny acknowledgement to the appearance of the world.”
- 2.
Gérard Simon describes optics since Descartes as “physics of light,” The eyes cease to be the point of issue of an optic ray to become a camera obscura: “A camera obscura whose opening is the pupil, whose membrane is the iris, whose contractible camera lens is the crystal lens and whose screen on which the image appears is the retina” (ibid., p. 19).
- 3.
Gernot Böhme (2000, p. 203ff.) interprets Plato’s theory of perception as a phenomenological. Indications of a correlation theory of perception, in which the entity seen and the entity seeing are mutually determined, can also be found in Plato (Theaetetus 159e-160a).
- 4.
Luce Irigaray. Quoted in M. Jay (1992, p. 493).
- 5.
Very convincing in this respect is Kaja Silverman’s (1997) treatment of the art of Cindy Sherman.
- 6.
A similar line of argumentation is found in D. C. Dennett (1991).
- 7.
Irvin Rock (1985) has explained this in evolutionarily biological terms as the “intelligence of perception.” See also Wolf Singer (2005, p. 148): “Our perceptions are not isomorphic pictures of some reality. They are instead the result of highly complex constructions and interpretation processes that rely heavily on stored knowledge.” Picturesque renditions of the neurobiological wonders of vision are contained in David Hubel’s (1988) compendium.
- 8.
Distinctions such as those made by Jerry Fodor (1990) between sense impressions and cognitively structured perceptions simply defer the problem.
- 9.
- 10.
- 11.
Austin (1962) critiques this from a linguistic viewpoint.
- 12.
This claim is made by R. Brandt (1999).
- 13.
Jonathan Crary (1988) made an interesting comment on this, comparing the Cartesian observer to the observer from Goethe’s colour theory.
- 14.
Ralf Konersmann (1995) has cast doubt on this attribution.
- 15.
Strawson’s critique of the correspondence theory of truth seems to refer primarily to talk about perception, not to perception itself.
- 16.
Sellars attack is directed less at the conception of sense data than the validity of arguments based on sense data.
- 17.
See W. Künne’s (1995) sophistic example of a bald man wearing the mask of a bald man in order to conceal a scar. The judgement is correct that the man is bald, although the sense impression involves an illusion.
- 18.
Ralph Schumacher’s (2004) Reconstruction of Berkeley convincingly shows that Berkeley‘s theory of perception is capable of explaining why some perceptions can display such independence from beliefs, despite the fact that perception is fundamentally subject to the influence of experience and habits.
- 19.
Dretske (1969, p. 20) contests that the utterance “that D looks some way to S” also means “for some character C, it looks to S as though (as if) D (or something) were C,” which would imply the existence of a form of non-epistemic seeing. His plea for a distinction between perception, beliefs, opinions etc. is however in large part founded on the contrary claim: “D can look some way to S without it looking to S as though it were C (for any C).”
- 20.
- 21.
This aspect of epistemic seeing is also heavily emphasised by R. Chisholm (1957).
- 22.
In that they depend on the performance of an act of seeing. Cf. III.1.a)-c).
- 23.
- 24.
Christiane Schildknecht (2003) has argued that because there exist non-conceptual sense impressions, we should make a distinction between content of perception and content of conviction, qualifying the way an object looks as something that is irreducible to propositional content.
- 25.
M. Seel (2004) has pointed out that seeing-something-in-something is not even the same as representative or iconic seeing. Seeing faces in clouds or wall marks does not mean they have been represented there.
- 26.
For an updated version, see E. W. Orth (1992).
- 27.
On Cassirer’s conception of consciousness and the parallels to Husserl’s concept of intentionality, see M. Plümacher (2004).
- 28.
Cassirer occasionally loses sight of his own insight when he disconnects this self-sufficient world of perception from the “world of sense impressions” in which we touch merely the “surface of reality” (ibid., p. 169).
- 29.
See B. Recki (2004, p. 26). Recki reconstructs Cassirer‘s concept of culture as “the medium of our poietic-practical self interpretation.” However, the performativity of this self and world interpretation is receiving increasingly less attention. The emphasis is instead placed on its normative connections to the values and rules of a language community.
- 30.
Oswald Schwemmer’s (1997) work is helpful here in explaining the ethico-aesthetical connection between form-giving and form-becoming. The concept of an interaction between a form formans and a form formata in Cassirer’s posthumous writings could supply an appropriate basis for a reformulation of his ideas in terms of performance theory.
- 31.
Ricoeur seems to me to somewhat uncritically overestimate the role of narration in developing order and founding unity. His classical leading figure is Odysseus on the way to himself and finally arriving. The errors and losses on this journey of self-discovery are generally blocked out.
- 32.
The advantages and disadvantages of this transformation for personal relations to the self are explored by Dieter Thomä (1998). Thomä approaches the subject from the question: What is right living? Narrative is a more appropriate way to develop an adequate image of one’s own life than the traditional projects of self-recognition. Although narrative can never answer the leading question, it can help “to experience, how I am and to construct what is important to me about me” (ibid., p. 15).
- 33.
Taylor develops his argumentation in the confrontation with Harry Frankfurt’s claims about reflexive wishing and second order desires. His examples show the constitutive function of the vocabulary used for evaluative, reflected action and the way self-interpretation and experience are mutually conditioned: “self-interpretations are partly constitutive of our experience” (Taylor 2010, p. 37).
- 34.
Nelson’s suggestion that visuality is to vision what sexuality is to sex (the former socially, the latter biologically) drags soul–body dualism back into the debate. Hal Foster (1988) denounced this split into the nature and culture of seeing back in 1988.
- 35.
In this context, Dieter Hoffman-Axthelm’s (1984) study is also relevant as a visual culture reading.
- 36.
Hans Dieter Huber’s (2004) investigation strikes a good balance between the appropriate consideration of environmental conditions and internal iconic and aesthetic factors.
- 37.
This is not the place to pit the omnipresence of images in our culture against the dominant text paradigm. Such polemic polarisation is superfluous and indeed counter-productive since it is conditioned by what it attempts to resist.
- 38.
Jonathan Crary’s (1992) study, is one such example of an examination of the technical-practical. It shows how, in the nineteenth century, geometrical optics were replaced by physiological optics and explores the effects this technical innovation had on the role of the observer.
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Schuermann, E. (2019). Why Seeing is a Problem. In: Seeing as Practice. Performance Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14507-1_2
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