Abstract
The concept of practice provides a way out of the false dichotomy found in the history of metaphysics. In the web of relations between the perceiver and the perceived, that which is actually noticed and that which is potentially perceivable are formed intersubjectively and interactively. The notion of practice breaks with the strict distinction between a perceiving subject and a perceived object in order to work out the interconnectedness between them and their social surrounding.
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Notes
- 1.
Husserl’s term ‘appresentation’ refers to the intentional presentation of other possible perceptions, which is added to all perception (see Husserl 1999).
- 2.
On the concept of gradations [Abschattungen; literally: shades] (see Husserl 1997).
- 3.
Martin Seel has explained this connection between doing and letting be in connection with his notion of self-determination, showing that a conscious and definite decision is often a decision to let oneself be determined from the outside (Seel 2002, pp. 279–298, especially 289f.). For the theory of practice, this duplicity is crucial to escape dichotomies such as that of active and autonomous vs. passive and heteronymous. The same must be shown for the practice of perception.
- 4.
Charles W. Morris (1970) originally introduced this distinction for application to all sign use. It has since become autonomous and has demonstrated its elucidative power in numerous contexts.
- 5.
A wealth of clearly organised examples can be found in R. S. Crutchfield (1982).
- 6.
- 7.
A good overview of the work by Ehrenfels, Metzger and Köhler is provided by M. Wertheimer (1974).
- 8.
The same goes for hearing; for example, hearing on the telephone that someone is embarrassed by a question. The structure is the same: something is both found as pre-existing and disclosed within sensory perception.
- 9.
“Willing, if it is not to be a sort of wishing, must be the action itself. It cannot be allowed to stop anywhere short of the action. If it is the action, then it is so in the ordinary sense of the word; so it is speaking, writing, walking, lifting a thing, imagining something. But it is also trying, attempting, making an effort, to speak, to write, to lift a thing, to imagine something etc” (Wittgenstein 1986, p. 160).
- 10.
Chopping wood is Rüdiger Bubner’s example of the altering capacity of an action. Bubner backs into a strangely reductionist argumentation when claiming that the practice of thinking, such as solving the problem of transcendental deduction, does not change the world whereas chopping wood does (Bubner 1976, p. 76). The present book does not presuppose this type of materialist understanding of what alteration could mean.
- 11.
See also idem (2008, 1048b).
- 12.
Interesting in this connection is: H. Böhme (2004). Böhme identifies in the history of science and medicine, in particular in seventeenth century vacuum theory, the same paradoxical simultaneity of production and mediation that I am claiming for seeing; a ‘performative mediality’ as the “mechanism, that in the process of representation creates at the same time as it represents” (ibid., p. 215).
- 13.
To speak here of technical preparation is more accurate than technical instruments such as microscopy or telescopy. Particle physics, for example, is an interesting rupture with models of scientific seeing based on the human eye, because elementary particles are too fast to be made visible. Telescopic and microscopic seeing are structurally similar to natural seeing, delivering to the eyes very small and very distant things as though they were visible without instruments. This is precisely no longer true of the proofs of particles moving in an accelerator. In contrast to the smallest microscopic particles, elementary particles are no longer visible at all. Only the traces of their effects can be visualised. The preparatory effort required to make them visible is so great that the manipulations involved appear constitutive for the observation of the observed. Therefore, scientific seeing must be seen to be as much a case of creation as discovery.
- 14.
This point will be treated at greater length further on.
- 15.
- 16.
Although there is an artificial quality to a terminological distinction between seeing and looking at, it can perhaps be said that looking at tends to relate to seeing as individual actions to practice and speech acts to speech. This means that looking at tends to be a pointed act aimed at a particular address. It has perlocutionary significance and can be deployed as a means, whereas seeing implies the non-conclusive character of practice and speech. Yet of course a look can wander about peripatetically without a particular aim, just as, inversely, seeing guided by interests leads to a tangible result and end beyond itself; that end being the information being sought for. The particularity of the interpersonal look appears to reside in reciprocity. This will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 8, Sect. 1.
- 17.
- 18.
On the distinction between recognition [Anerkennung] and recognising [Anerkennen], see G. Gamm (2000).
- 19.
See Nicolai Hartmann (2002), who describes life as “a running chain of coming and going situations”.
- 20.
For Stuart Hampshire (1982), acts are always already situated by virtue of the fact that the human being is at once “observer, actor and language-user.”
- 21.
- 22.
This has been made acutely tangible in the worldwide exhibition ‘Dialogue in the Dark,’ in which museum visitors are taken through absolutely dark rooms by a blind guide and learn to depend on their hearing, touch, and sense of space.
- 23.
- 24.
On the relation of conditioning between the linguistic and non-linguistic in the context of practice, see Joachim Schulte (1999).
- 25.
Interesting material on this topic can be found in the anthology from E. Fischer-Lichte (2001).
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Schuermann, E. (2019). The Practice of Seeing. In: Seeing as Practice. Performance Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14507-1_3
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