"When philosophy paints its grey in grey then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk." -- G.W.F. Hegel, 'Preface', Philosophy of Right.
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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx
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an ocularcentric paradigm?
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April 7, 2010
In the Introduction to Modernity and the hegemony of vision (edited by David Michael Levin) Levin says:
For those of us who can see, vision is, of all the modes of perception, the one which is primary and predominant, at least in the conduct of our everyday lives. This does not seem open to much debate. More problematic, however, is the narrative that argues for the domination, the hegemony, of a visual paradigm in our cultural history. Can it be demonstrated that, beginning with the ancient Greeks, our Western culture has been dominated by an ocularcentric paradigm, a vision-generated, vision-centered interpretation of knowledge, truth, and reality? If so, many more questions follow. Can it be argued that, in the period we call "modernity" (the period beginning, say, with the "discovery" of perspectivism and the rationalization of sight in the Italian Renascimento of the fifteenth century), this ocularcentrism has assumed a distinctively modern historical form? How is the ocularcentrism of modernity different from that which prevailed in earlier ages? Has
the character of the dominant vision changed in correlation with the evolution of modernity, its hegemony manifesting itself differently in each of the centuries since the Renascimento? What is left, today, of the rational vision of the Enlightenment? Has its institutionalization in the course of modernity given it historically distinctive forms of incorporation, power, and normativity? How has the paradigm of vision ruled, and with what effects?
He goes onto ask whether our contemporary culture is really still ocularcentric, whether it is in transition to a different, historically new paradigm, and whether she could be right about the future importance of the logos, of a paradigm based on speaking and listening. If we are becoming deafer, it may be doubted that our capacity for listening can be counted on to redeem the logic of our cultural history and its future. Is there a postmodern future beyond the governance of ocularcentrism?
He says that In "The Age of the World Picture," Heidegger not only considers the hegemony of vision to have had its beginningin the culture and philosophies of ancient Greece but thinks it has continued into our own time. In fact, he thinks, the historical form that this hegemony has assumed in the latest phase of the modern period is particularly ominous, reducing everything to the ocularcentric ontology of subject-relative images or representations. Moreover, this historical development of our ontology as he sees it is so distinctive, so decisively different from the ontology of earlier historical periods that he argues for the recognition of a "new epoch," defined precisely in terms of this reduction of being to being-represented
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We understand and make conclusions about our environment with our brains, the senses we have are only means to communicate this environment - to translate it into a language our brain can understand. Putting that into consideration, can we not now say that the digital world where the environment is increasingly being passed through to help our brains reach an understanding of some sort be considered the new sense? That computers seem to have become an organ that functions to help the individuals comprehend their surrounding just like our traditional five senses?