Episode 64 - Vision

Transcript

Ellie: 0:11

Hello everyone. I am your co-host, Professor Ellie Anderson.

David: 0:14

And I am your other co-host, Professor David Peña-Guzmán.

Ellie: 0:18

Welcome to Overthink where we talk about big ideas in the context of the history of philosophy in everyday life.

David: 0:24

Today we are bringing you the second episode of our five part series on the senses. Vision seems to be different from the other senses because it involves a distance between the subject and the object. I can't see something that is right on top of my eyes, Aristotle says this, and we discussed that in our previous episode.

Ellie: 0:44

Last episode, yeah.

David: 0:45

Yes, we need a medium for vision, and that medium is either space, air, or light, depending on what theorist you happen to be.

Ellie: 0:55

And I think for this reason, vision has gotten a really bad rap in a lot of recent philosophy. Because vision involves a sense of distance. It's been seen as giving rise to a cold, immutable, even violent perception of things. And you see this in the feminist philosophy of Luce Irigaray, for instance, who goes so far as to associate the traditional way of understanding vision as the sense of distance with a masculinist or even phallic perception.

David: 1:23

Yeah, and I think the feminist worry from Irigaray in particular, but also others, has a lot to do with the idea that this distancing component of vision involves a very strong separation between the subject and the object. And this detachment allows us to be sovereign over that, which we see. So there's a power in balance. And the sense of sovereignty and detachment is closely related to the trend in philosophy to associate vision with knowledge. Knowledge is power, sure. But knowledge is also a kind of seeing. It is a kind of contemplating. Just think about how many metaphors for knowledge and ignorance are rooted in vision.

Ellie: 2:07

It is everywhere. I can see clearly for instance, seeing the light, the enlightenment.

David: 2:15

I see where you're coming from.

Ellie: 2:17

Ooh, that's a good one.

David: 2:18

Or think about also that ableist expression, the blind leading the blind, where the absence of vision is used as an example for the absence of knowledge. So here, blindness is a code word for ignorance. Speaking of which, if you want to hear us speak with experts on vision, including thinking about ableism around visual impairments, you should definitely check out our YouTube interview series that we created to pair with these episodes because the topics come up there.

Ellie: 2:48

Yeah, and speaking of the YouTube series, one of the things that really blew my mind when we were interviewing the neuro ophthalmologist, Dr. Rabih Hage that I really wanted to share in this episode is the fact that a third of the volume of the brain is dedicated to vision, which made me think that maybe these metaphors associating vision with knowledge are not so bad, except of course, when they're ableist in nature. But also that the privileging of vision that we see in the history of philosophy and that we critiqued a bit in our last episode on touch, at least comes from a place that sort of makes sense given how much of our brain is devoted to vision.

David: 3:25

Yeah, and I think it's not only the amount of, let's say, cortical tissue that is devoted to vision. It's also the fact that the visual pathway has been studied inside and out. I mean, we know more about the visual pathway than pretty much about all the other sensory pathways combined, which is contributing to this weight that we continue to give vision in our thinking, not just about experience, but in relation to our capacity to know.

Ellie: 3:52

Yeah, which is part of the reason that theorists of the other senses and scientists who study the other senses will say that the privileging and vision is a little bit biased. Because you're right, David, that we have studied it more than other senses. But I guess a question that that interview brought up for me was, is there at least some potential reason to that? Whereas I had previously, you know, fully bought the critique that vision shouldn't be considered the first of the senses. Today we're talking about vision.

David: 4:21

Why has vision historically been the most privileged of the senses?

Ellie: 4:25

How do ancient Greek and Veic approaches to vision result in different theories of knowledge?

David: 4:30

And are important aspects of our visual experience, such as our perception of colors, determined by culture and language?

Ellie: 4:42

Ancient philosophy is known for strongly privileging vision over other senses, and I want to talk about two ancient traditions here, and they're different responses to the privileging of vision. The ancient Greek tradition one finds and philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle, and the ancient Vedic tradition that one finds in Hindu scripture. I'm going to be focusing specifically on the Upanishads. The Greeks were obsessed with light and clarity, and in fact a lot of their words for knowing, which in turn often lead to English words for knowing, have roots in vision. For instance, the word theoria, the root of which gives us theory, theorem, and even theater originally meant to look attentively or to behold.

David: 5:24

Oh, I hadn't thought about the connection specifically to theater and spectacle, which I guess also comes from a similar route spectate at. But also in thinking about the role of vision in a Greek culture, we should consider one important difference between the Greeks and later Christians, which is that the ancient Greek gods were visible to humans. Unlike the God of Christianity that cannot be seen, cannot be located, cannot be touched. And the gods in turn loved nothing more than spying on mortals. So there was this back and forth relation of vision between mortals and the gods in classical Greece.

Ellie: 6:08

The Greek gods are just like creeps looking down from above or looking at nymphs in their bath.

David: 6:14

Pervs.

Ellie: 6:15

Yeah, I mean there is a very pervy ancient Greek tradition of spying on naked women.

David: 6:20

Yeah. Zeus is a major perv. I mean, he ruled through sexual prowess. And rape.

Ellie: 6:28

Well, yeah, but I'm thinking specifically about vision here, spying on nymphs or women bathing. And Hans Blumenberg in fact attributed the Greek's love of vision to the beautiful light that shines on the sunny region of Greece.

David: 6:43

Mm. That sounds a little bit like a stretch, but I guess if I were basking in the bright Mediterranean sun all day every day, maybe also conclude that light and vision are the same and they are both divine.

Ellie: 6:55

Oh yeah. I mean, true Socrates for instance, calls vision the most sunlike of the senses in the Republic, and he thinks it is superior to the other senses. But nonetheless, in Plato's Dialogue, Socrates maintains that vision cannot give us true knowledge because it like all the other senses, is relative to the subject doing the perceiving. And that idea, that perception is not knowledge because perception is too relative it comes out in the Dialogue, the Theaetetus. So true knowledge for Socrates resides not in this world, not in the perceptible world at all, but in the forms. So I want to talk about this for a moment because I think it reveals something interesting about the privileging of vision in ancient Greek philosophy. The forms, Socrates says, are eternal changeless objects that provide the paradigm for the actual objects we interact with in the everyday world. All beautiful objects, for instance, partake of the form beauty, and all good things partake of the form of good. He even says there's a form of bed, which leads to people wondering whether there's a form for everything. Like my students always wonder, is there a form for a computer given that computers didn't exist? I'm like, Well, they're eternal and changeless. But also there's ambiguity in the Dialogues between how many forms there are, whether there's one for each object. In any case, Socrates thinks that the forms do not exist in the sensory world. They are super sensible, eternal entities, and this means that we can't see them, we can't touch them, we can't hear them, and so on.

David: 8:24

Yeah. I mean, we can only intellect them or think about them, but you know, I, I'd love to smell the form of beauty. I'd touch the form of the good. Lots of questions here about the relationship between the sensible and the intelligible. Either way, for Socrates, true knowledge cannot come from the senses, including vision, even though it is this the most sun-like of the senses, but we are supposed to be talking about vision. Ellie, so what's the connection here? Why are we talking about knowledge of the forms in the Platonic Dialogues?

Ellie: 9:01

Yeah, I have a point. So, but good question, a valid question for sure. And so this is where it gets funny because Socrates denies, as we've seen, that vision can give us knowledge of the forms. But many of the ways that he describes the forms use the language of vision. The very word for forms in ancient Greek is eidos, which is where we get the word idea, which is also sometimes translated as. This word eidos means something seen or intuitive, and so it has this resonance of vision. As you said, David sensibility and intelligibility here are, sure considered distinct, but the word is also implying their conflation. And this resonance or even conflation between knowledge and vision can be seen in a zillion places in Plato's Dialogues where analogies are often made between vision and knowledge. So on the one hand, Socrates is saying that the senses don't give us true knowledge because they give us only perception, which is relative. But on the other hand, Socrates is always using these metaphors of vision as analogies for true knowledge, as if he couldn't cast off the language of vision in his theories.

David: 10:12

Yeah, I guess he was basking in the sun of the Mediterranean, couldn't help it. We've established this.

Ellie: 10:18

I think he was more just like pestering people in the marketplace. But I guess that's a form of basking. You can do both at the same time.

David: 10:24

Uh, he was basking in the glory and also sun bathing same time. Uh, but I mean, he spent a lot of time outdoors.

Ellie: 10:31

True, true. Which is very different from contemporary Americans. I just heard on the radio last night that we spend 93% of our time indoors.

David: 10:39

Oh, okay. That's why we're bad philosophers.

Ellie: 10:43

What you don't think an armchair is a good place to do philosophy from? In any case, I want to compare this to the view of knowledge and vision that you get in ancient Vedic scriptures where you see some key similarities, but also I think a very interesting difference. And as I mentioned, I'm going to focus on the Upanishads here. The Vedic scriptures are a really wide body of text. Even the Upanishads were written over a long, long span of time as opposed to say the Platonic Dialogues. So I'll mention when I'm talking about specific Upanishads, but I think there really is a general kind of through line that we can see throughout a number of Upanishads on this question of vision and knowledge. So like Plato's Dialogues, the Upanishads insist that ultimate reality is beyond the bounds of the senses. The Chandogya Upanishad, for instance, says of ultimate reality that sight does not reach there. And this is because reality, as figured by Brahman, the essence of the cosmos and also the formulation of truth is imperishable and eternal, while the senses have to do with mortal bodies. Although interestingly, you also see that just like in the Dialogues, there are numerous metaphors of vision in the account of ultimate reality. The Upanishads used spatial metaphors such as saying that truth is hidden, right? Visual metaphor or talking about the cave of the heart. Although sight in Upanishads most often appears in a list with the vital function. So the explicit places where sight appears are often listed with the other vital functions. But I think you still see this denigration of sight as a way of getting to truth. While there's also a bit of a reliance, although a lot less strong than we saw in the Platonic Dialogues that we see there.

David: 12:30

What are those vital functions? Talk about that a little bit.

Ellie: 12:34

Okay, well, very interestingly, they're not actually the five senses. They're the five breaths. They're sometimes called. The first one is breathing, second one is thinking, third is speech, fourth is sight, and fifth is hearing. So we have sight and hearing, which are, two of the senses that we recognize. But then there's breathing, thinking, and speech, which are the other three vital functions or, or vital breaths.

David: 12:58

I love thinking about functions rather than just senses because it, it just classifies our experience in a very different way.

Ellie: 13:04

Totally. Well, and the Upanishads also talk about smell, touch, and, uh, taste. I forgot about taste. Sorry, I forgot about taste. Um, so that comes up in the Upanishads it's just that they're not considered vital functions in the way that these other five are, which in itself is very interesting. But I want to mention after having, you know, now kind of set this up that even though there's a lot of similarity between the ancient Greek and the ancient Vedic view, where sight is not a way to get to truth, but it is nonetheless, occasionally resorted to, in Upanishads. Yeah. Or very often resorted to, in the case of ancient Greek, is that there's a really key difference between the two. We've seen that ancient Greek thought, at least in Plato's Dialogues, dissociates vision from reason, saying that only reason can reach the realm of the forms. That is ultimate reality. But the Upanishads deny even this. So for the Vedic understanding, both vision and reason need to be cast aside in the pursuit of encountering the cosmos as it really is. And there's a quote here from the Chandogya Upanishad that I want to read, which is when the five perceptions are stilled together with the mind and not even reason stirs itself, they call it the highest state. So you want to still the five perceptions you want to still thinking, right? Not just sight and other, you know, what we would consider the senses and you want to still the mind too, which is kind of at a even a different level.

David: 14:41

And so it seems like the link between reason and vision, which you may be perhaps seeing both traditions is less of a problem for the Upanishads because reason and therefore the traces of vision do not actually give us access to ultimate reality there.

Ellie: 15:00

Yeah. Reason is still misleading according to this view, because let's say like sight, it encourages you to see things as separate, right? Reason involves an act of parsing things. And I think, you know, you can kind of say the same, a vision, which I know we'll talk about a little bit later as well. Vision is what enables us to distinguish between different things within the same simultaneous field. And so from this Vedic point of view, reason and thinking are going to perpetuate the myth of separation rather than get us to the ultimate truth, which is that of unity.

David: 15:42

I want to go back to the quote that you mentioned, Ellie, because it's really powerful. So you said when the five perceptions are stilled together with the mind and not even reason, bestirs itself. They call it the highest state. And so it seems like what this quote is telling us is that when our five perceptions are quieted and the mind is quieted and reason is quieted, that's what we call the highest state. So the highest state is actually a state of passivity or acquiescence.

Ellie: 16:18

It's not even passivity because it's beyond the binary between passivity and activity. Right. It's a non-dual state of unity. Of complete absorption in Brahman or association with Ottman, which is very roughly translated as the higher self, but ultimately is indistinct from other things, right? You're getting to the point where you realize that nothing is an independent entity. So even thinking about passivity would imply that there is something that is acting on you, and so the passivity activity binary would not achieve this true state of non-duality.

David: 16:53

And I can definitely see how this is radically different than the Greek model where the highest state for Greek philosophers was a model of mental activity, constant contemplation. It's thought thinking itself. It's what was called nous.

Ellie: 17:07

Absolutely. And this idea of separation is not a problem for Greek thinkers. They actually think it's something to strive for. So if you are an ancient Greek philosopher, you want to recognize the fact that the apparent world is changeable in a state of becoming passing away, and that is separate from the realm of the forms. In Vedic thought, yes it's also true that the changeable passing world of the sensible is misleading, but it's not ultimately separate from this super sensible world in the way that it is in the Socratic view of the forms.

David: 18:05

I want to talk now about an article that you and I both read in preparation for this episode, and that is Hans Jonas 1954 essay, "The Nobility of Sight."

Ellie: 18:16

I'm so excited to talk about this with you, and what really happened for listeners is that I discovered this essay and I was like, Oh my God, David, this essay is perfect for us discuss on this episode. And you were like, yeah, I read that essay like 10 years ago. And so then I suggest that we talk about it on the episode.

David: 18:32

Well, it's been around for a while, 1954.

Ellie: 18:34

Well, yeah. No, I just mean that I discovered it for the first time and then it turned out that you had long been aware of it, but you weren't going to tell me how amazing it was. You were just going to let me persist in my random ass research without knowing this article.

David: 18:46

Yes, and as soon as you said it, my reaction was like, oh my God, that essay is so good. We absolutely have to talk it episode on vision, and initially we're going to talk about something completely unrelated.

Ellie: 18:57

What were we going to talk about?

David: 18:58

We're going to talk about Galileo and the telescope, which I think is still really fascinating.

Ellie: 19:02

We'll save that for our Patreon bonus video.

David: 19:04

I think that's a great idea, but for now, let's jump in to this 1954 essay because it is a very good articulation of what makes vision unique. The article, in short, tracks the privileging of sight in ancient philosophy and ends up concluding that it is with good reason that ancient philosopher's privileged sight.

Ellie: 19:29

Shocking. Like I said earlier, I feel like much of the 20th century has involved philosophers hating on how sight has been the dominant sense throughout the history of philosophy. And there's even a book by Martin Jay called Downcast Eyes, the Denigration of Vision in 20th Century French Thought, but here we have Jonas defending it.

David: 19:48

That's such a good title, Downcast Eyes, because it just gives you such a visual image of the people who denigrate vision ugh, don't want to look at you because it's too violent. Instead, I will only engage in touch.

Ellie: 20:02

Yeah, and like I said, I do think that there's a lot of really good stuff, especially in feminist theory and phenomenology in the 20th century, about why the privileging of vision can be really misleading. But I do think that this article by Jonas helped me figure out why vision would've been so popular throughout the history of philosophy and the place I want to start with this is one of the features of vision that Jonas identifies, and that is the idea of simultaneity. He says that simultaneity is a distinctive feature of vision. Vision is unique among the senses because it is the only sense that allows us to behold multiple sense objects at the same time. Whereas other senses are sequential. So for instance, when I behold a visual field, I can see a lot of things within that visual field, right? If I'm looking out at a park, I see a lawn, I see a tree, I see the sky. I see the sun, I see other people, I see a bench, and so on and so forth. But I do that all at the same time. Whereas when I am listening to a piece of music, for instance, I only hear a given chord or a given note at a particular time.

David: 21:21

Yes, and the way in which Jonas talks about this is in terms of the difference between the givenness of the visual field and the synthesis that has to happen with the other senses like hearing and also touch. So because hearing and touch unfold as temporal sequences where we have to wait for the next note or for the next texture, the mind has to keep track of what has happened in the past and then eventually synthesize a series into an object like, oh, that was a melody, or, oh, that was a particular texture. But with vision, he says everything is given simultaneously, which means that it takes out that temporal element.

Ellie: 22:05

Mm mm. What do you think about touch? Like, could you potentially touch multiple things at the same time?

David: 22:11

You can touch multiple things at the same time, like with different hands, um, but you cannot touch multiple things simultaneously with the same touching surface. And even the act of touch. If you just put your hand on a surface, you've made contact, but you have not yet truly touched the surface. You have to slide your hand over the surface in order to get touch qualities. Is it rough? Is it smooth? Is it safe? Is it soft? Is it hard? So you have to apply a combination of movement pressure to get to the qualitative.

Ellie: 22:46

David, I'm so glad you mentioned that, because I'm remembering that is something he addresses in the article. He says that sight is unique in its ability to recognize a simultaneity of various objects while they are potentially at rest. Right? And so that's a special thing about sight. It doesn't need to move around in order to recognize that there are different objects. And he says all other senses construct their perceptual unity out of a temporal sequence of sensations which in themselves are nonspatial. So there's this profound spatiality to vision that he's addressing here, which is the ability to look at multiple things that are at rest at the same time and recognize them as separate.

David: 23:26

I know and to get directly to the point that has been bugging me in reading this essay again for this episode, and that is that I actually just disagree with Jonas that point. I don't think vision is simultaneous, although I understand why he thinks that. And when I think about vision, I still think there's an element of activity and temporal unfolding that has to happen in order for the visual field to come into its own. Because when we look at a field, it's not really as if we see the trees and the benches and whatever else you said, like the birds in the sky, at the same time, we actually have to quote unquote, touch the visual field with our eyes by moving our eyes across the visual field in order to synthesize the unity of the visual world.

Ellie: 24:23

Okay.

David: 24:24

And so I do think there's a lot of movement and temporality that he's overlooking.

Ellie: 24:28

So your claim might be that Jonas is giving us a sense of the field division as two dimensional, but we need to recognize that it is four dimensional. I would add that it's also three dimensional, which is, that's not like rocket science, but just to say, to say that I, I think that is maybe part of what is going unnoticed here as well, which is how the ability to move helps us recognize the three dimensionality of the visual field as well. So, for instance, if I see a still image, a park, I might not realize that it is actually just a very realistic life size painting of a park. But if I move around, then I am going to start to see that the tree is not changing in the way I would expect it to change if it were a three-dimensional object. Right? The shadows are not starting to fall in different ways. I'm not starting to see different perspectives on it, and that's then give, going to give me a sense that this is actually a two dimensional object rather than a real park.

David: 25:26

Right, and so I think you and I, Ellie read the same article in two different forms. You read the original article as an article, whereas I read it as a book chapter in Jonas' book, The Phenomenon of Life Toward a Philosophical Biology. Where he includes an appendix after this essay in which he kind of backtracks a little bit, and he says, look, I recognize that some kind of movement

is necessary: 25:54

perspective and depth.

Ellie: 25:57

Oh, interesting. Wait, when was that book published? Can you check real quick for us? I see you have it. David is holding the book as we speak.

David: 26:04

Let me see. Hold on. Um, it was originally published in 1966 by Harper and Roe in New York.

Ellie: 26:12

Thanks, thanks for the details on that. I was just asking about the date, but, okay. Important. Okay, so maybe he revised his original view that was developed 1954 article by the time that the book was published. Common philosopher thing to do.

David: 26:28

Yeah, and I think this introduces a real tension because he recognizes that perspective and depth are functions of bodily movement. You wouldn't be able to have a sense of depth if you couldn't move around an object.

Ellie: 26:38

Yeah, that's what I was talking about with that 3D right element.

David: 26:41

Yes. But then he also says that there has to be some very basic forms of activity, even at the level of like eye movements and bodily movements of the head and neck for things like the orientation of the gaze. So I suspect maybe this critique was made of his notion that the field is this unity that is given all at once. Now, although I think he is mistaken in the original article that we can experience different objects of the visual field simultaneously if we, if we're strict about that. I don't think that's true because it takes time to literally like, look at one and then look at the other, like to focus. I still think he makes a really fascinating point about this, and that has to do with the nature of selective attention. Basically, he says, when you have a visual field, what's unique about it relative to let's say, a hearing scape or a smell scape or a touch scape, is that the field remains there relatively stable even as your focus, your selective attention jumps around the field. So for example, right now I can look at the tree, then I can look at the bench, and then I can come back to the tree, which is still there. It didn't disappear.

Ellie: 28:04

Yeah.

David: 28:05

And that's what you cannot do with music because once a note happens, it disappears, right? Like you cannot back.

Ellie: 28:13

Yeah, that's a great point, David. And I think this is related to what I thought was so fascinating about this article, which is that Jonas thinks that this unique ability of vision to perceive the manifold within the same space at the same time, roughly gives rise to the conception of two fundamental philosophical principles. The first is the idea of the present moment, and the second is the idea of the eternal. So he thinks that because we can perceive these multiple things all at the same time, it introduces the beholder to a whole time dimension, otherwise not disclosed, which is the present as something more than the point experience of the passing. Now that last part was a quote is why it sounded more like Jonas than it did like me. But the, the basic idea is that, you know, when you think about hearing for instance, the present is just a passing point in our everyday perception of it. But what we see with vision, what we see with vision, see, oh, I just said it again. Oh my God. I'm using visual metaphors.

David: 29:20

You can't escape it. You cannot.

Ellie: 29:22

Cannot avoid. So what we see with vision is that the present is actually content rich. It's not just this point.

David: 29:32

Well and beyond that because vision is about objects that persist in a field rather than events that emerge and then disappear in time. That's the origin for him of our very notion of being rather than becoming, it's the stability of the field.

Ellie: 29:51

So that's an eternal point, which I think the second point that I really wanted to talk about here. So he thinks that if we didn't have the sense of vision, we wouldn't have any conception of the eternal, but this idea of the eternal, one thing that you didn't mention in, in your introduction to that a moment ago, David, is that the notion of change versus changelessness arises because we can see some things changing in our visual field while others do not. And so in the case of the park, I see that the bench stays stable while the person is moving and while the leaves on the trees are moving, but the trunk of the tree is staying as it is, that gives us, for the first time he thinks, this unique sense of the difference between changeability or becoming and changelessness or being.

David: 30:40

Yeah, and I think this is one good way of thinking about what a lot of phenomenologists in the 20th century are after. They are trying to explain how concepts, theoretical concepts that we use in philosophy like being versus becoming time and space, et cetera, et cetera, are outgrowths of the very structure of our lived experience. In this case vision, it is because vision has a certain structure, a certain logic to it, that then philosophers can sort of talk about something like being or the eternal or the unchanging because it grows directly out of an element of how we experience the world.

Ellie: 31:23

Absolutely, and I, I think that's so right that phenomenology as this study of lived experience is invested in showing, unlike very, very different from Socrates and Plato's Dialogues, showing that our perception of the eternal comes from the eternal. Right for Socrates, the perception of everyday life comes ultimately from ultimate reality, which is this super sensible realm of the forms. And for phenomenologists, it's the other way around. We get the idea of super sensible concepts through our everyday sense experiences. Even mathematics in fact, founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl says that.

David: 32:02

Yes, definitely. And

Ellie: 32:04

Wait. Right? Does he? Am I misremembering that?

David: 32:06

That mathematic cold truths grow out of lived experience? Oh yeah, definitely it, yeah.

Ellie: 32:12

Okay. Just, I'm just making sure I had a moment where I was like, I know he's also a transcendental idealist, arguably. Okay. Anyway.

David: 32:19

I've, I've, I've published about about Husserl's Theory of Mathematics.

Ellie: 32:22

Hell yes. So I will take your yes as yes leave it at, go David.

David: 32:26

Yeah and so far we've talked a lot about simultaneity, which is something that differentiates vision from the other senses. But Jonas says that there are other things that also differentiate it, and he introduces a term that I really like, which is dynamic neutralization. What does that mean? Jonas makes the argument that when I am presented with a visual field, again, let's use the, the example of the park. Purely visual experience is the experience of me over here, you know, in my head or in my chest, wherever my eye is located, confronted with a world that is out there in front of me, sort of receding to infinity into the horizon. And that world is largely passive, relative to me as far as the vision is concerned, and the reason for this has to do with the concept of force. According to Jonas, the concept of force is not a visual concept, it's actually something that comes from touch. So the, the notion of something exerting force on me is literally something affecting my body through an impact. But if I'm confronted with a relatively static visual field, and that's the totality of my experience, I would never have an understanding of either force or activity. It's only a landscape that I contemplate from a distance, and again, in classic, phenomenal, logical fashion he says this is the origin of the distinction between theory and praxis. The world of vision is purely the world of theory because it doesn't affect me and I can exist as an isolated, independent subject that is removed from the world. The notion of like an eye that is outside of the world comes from vision.

Ellie: 34:19

Yeah. It's like, so mind blowing reading this article because I, I don't know if Jonas is right or not, right? But it is fascinating that he does offer this pretty compelling account. Now, I'm wondering if fascinating too is a visual metaphor having to do with the fixing of the gaze on something. Anyway, I just got, I distracted myself as I was talking. But one of the things that I was reminded of as you were just talking about this, David, is something that hadn't occurred to me while I was reading the article, which is the idea of structure as being also linked with vision. And this is a little bit farfield, so I don't want to get into it too much, but there's a big theme in the 20th century movements of structuralism and post-structuralism to talk about well structure and, um, Derrida in particular separate structure from force. And says that there is an occlusion of force from structuralism, like structuralism forgets to think about force. And I'm wondering if that also has to do with the privileging of vision also, I just checked for you as I was speaking, I know, shocking. I can do both at the same time. Um, did not edit this, this is like truly the that I was going to say, uh, fascinate comes from the Latin word fascinum which is a spell or witchcraft. And so to fascinate means to bewitch. So it is not actually a visual metaphor. We're we're in the clear on that one.

David: 35:46

Okay. So that would be more of like, um, oh, I don't know what, how we would connect that to the senses, but when you are put under a spell, you lose sense of who you are. I don't know where this is going.

Ellie: 35:59

Yeah, I don't know about that.

David: 36:00

Yeah, sometimes you ever think we have dead ends and you just witnessed one? No, but it, it is really interesting to think about all the structural features of the visual field as giving rise then to these other ideas. And, and there's a place in the essay that stood out to me where he says basically that it's from the nature of vision that we also get the idea of infinity.

Ellie: 36:25

Mm-hmm.

David: 36:26

And that has to do with the horizon, right? Like I look at the horizon and I see a mountain, and then I have this intuition that there might be something beyond the horizon. So I go to the mountain, I go to the top, and I see that there is indeed something beyond. And then I go to the horizon of that horizon. And again, there is something beyond, so on and so forth. And so from vision, just like from opening our eyes, we have this implicit sense that there is an infinity in the finite world.

Ellie: 36:59

What did you think about that, David? Because I'm wasn't sure that I actually bought that. I think at minimum what we would need is that movement, the traversing the visual field in order to get the sense of the horizon. Because only then would we see that the horizon is infinite because the horizon is continually moving. It doesn't strike me that just perceiving a manifold of simultaneously existing objects at one. So would give us a sense of infinity, like why not think that the horizon is just two dimensional? It goes back to my 3D point.

David: 37:28

So, yeah, I guess you would have to then pursue the horizon and see that it opens up to a hidden depth.

Ellie: 37:35

But he doesn't say that right?

David: 37:36

Yeah. I don't know if you actually have to traverse it, but I think the way he says it is that the horizon is always an invitation to forward motion. So it's just in the nature of a horizon that it sort of attracts me and lets me know that as soon as I arrive there will be another horizon. He, he basically describes it as depths, hidden behind depths. And that's the beginning of our sense of the infinite.

Ellie: 38:03

And there's absolutely more to say about this article than we would have time to do here. But I just want to quickly mention as well that Jonas points out something that I think has been in the background of a lot of our conversation, which is the idea that vision involves a distance from what we are seeing. And this is something we briefly mentioned earlier, and it really I think is what sets up this possibility of neutralization as well as this possibility of theory objectivity, right? Because he says that related to this possibility for theorizing, the theory practice distinction that comes up in vision is also the possibility of objectivity. We only get objectivity through sight, not from the other senses for him.

David: 38:46

And not just objectivity, that's how we get freedom. Ultimately, I think this is the payout of this article because he says it's from the visual field that we derive the insight that we ourselves are free agents. And, and this has to do with selective attention, which we talked about earlier. So when I look at a lot of objects in the visual field, I realize that I am free to look at any of them or to not look, whereas we cannot do that with hearing.

Ellie: 39:17

The noises outside my windows, like I gotta put in earplugs or else I am besieged.

David: 39:22

Yeah. And um, one of the people that we interviewed in our YouTube series about hearing capture this by noting that we are free to not look at things, which is why we have eyelids, but there are no ear lids, right? We don't have the freedom to close off our hearing. And so freedom comes from vision through distance because the more I focus on distant objects, the more I realize all the possibilities for motoric action that are available to me in my environment, that I can control those objects, I can approach them or I can recede from them. I cannot arrive at that conclusion from any of the other senses. So we are free because we see.

Ellie: 40:04

But this is also why a lot of 20th century thinkers, including feminist thinkers and especially feminist thinkers, have critiqued the privileging of vision so much. Because think about the words that we're talking about, objectivity, freedom, et cetera, et cetera. Those are precisely the things that make us think that we're detached from nature, from the world, from other people, and that can give rise to oppression, objectification, dehumanization.

David: 40:29

Yeah, I mean, even the title of the book, The Nobility of Reason. Kill the nobles.

Ellie: 40:33

You mean the nobility of sight?

David: 40:35

Is it sight? The Nobility of Sight. Yes. Still kill the nobles. If you're enjoying Overthink, please consider supporting the podcast by joining our Patreon. We are an independent, self-supporting podcast, and as a subscriber, you can help us cover our key production costs, gain access to our exclusive digital library of bonus content, and more. In 1858, William Gladstone, who was an expert in the classics and listened to this, the Prime Minister of England.

Ellie: 41:16

Oh yeah, Gladstone. I mean, he's a really famous prime minister.

David: 41:19

I know. He wrote a book entitled Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age.

Ellie: 41:24

That I didn't know.

David: 41:25

Yes, I, yeah. So where we're going. We're where classics meets politics, and he wrote this book that caused a major stir among classicists in the 19th century and not for good reasons.

Ellie: 41:37

What do you mean not for good reasons? Did people hate it?

David: 41:41

Um, honestly, yes.

Ellie: 41:43

Okay.

David: 41:44

So a lot of people thought that Gladstone was unable to evaluate the Homeric age objectively because he was just such a homer fanboy, Homer no wrong. And little fun historical factoid here. Karl Marx once pointed to that book by Gladstone and said that it was clear proof that the English are unable to do philology well.

Ellie: 42:11

My God. Was it that he was just too excited about it or was he actually saying things that were wrong about the Greeks?

David: 42:18

Well, that's the thing. The book is a mixed bag. It has some really fascinating, and then it has some fascinatingly bad ideas.

Ellie: 42:28

I mean, I don't know that those categories are necessarily distinct. Like I think you would have to say fascinatingly good and fascinatingly bad, right?

David: 42:35

True, true. It had some fascinating ideas, some of which were good and some of which were bad, but they were equally fascinating. For example, one thing that Gladstone insisted on was the idea that the Iliad and the Odyssey by Homer were not just literary texts, but were in fact rooted in some basic historical reality, in events that truly took place. And we now know that that's true. But people in the 19th century thought this was absolutely preposterous, largely because the, the ruins of Troy hadn't been yet discovered. So it was agreed upon that these were purely literary imagined situations, but he was one of the first ones to really defend the claim that they were rooted in historical fact.

Ellie: 43:23

That's so interesting. I didn't know that there was that controversy.

David: 43:26

Yeah. Yeah. And it's, you know, it's pretty recent to the 20th century. On the other hand, he also tried really hard to Christianize the Homeric age and the Greeks in a way that's just deeply anachronistic and problematic. So, for instance, he made the argument that Apollo was basically their version of Jesus. And that Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades were the Greeks version of the Christian trinity. So he spent a lot of time trying to make these parallels between the two cultures.

Ellie: 43:59

That sounds absurd. I mean, I, I think there is, I've heard somewhere else this link between Apollo and Jesus, I can't remember where, but to say that there's an equivalent for all of the Christian concepts in ancient Greek religion is, is just like, it's just a no, it's a no.

David: 44:19

Yeah, it, it's just a no. And because he believed that there had been a Christian revelation before the birth of Christ. So like at the origin of time, God had really revealed himself to everybody.

Ellie: 44:30

These are fascinating ideas in the sense of bewitching, right? We had that

David: 44:36

Yes.

Ellie: 44:37

whole moment a few minutes ago where we talked about fascinating ideas versus fascinating bad ideas, and did not refer back to the fact that we had just talked about the origin of fascinating. I like truly forgot it. I'm stuck in my hot closet recording.

David: 44:50

Ellie has been hallucinating the past 20 minutes.

Ellie: 44:54

My brain power is diminishing fast.

David: 44:58

Well, so then let's speed things up here, before you expire, because even though there are these great ideas and then these bad ideas in the text, what people remember the most today about Gladstone's book is a very specific section in which he talks about color perception among the Greeks. And in this section, he made the argument in short that the Greeks did not experience colors like we do. And if you read the Illiad and the Odyssey very closely, he says, you realize that the Greeks did not experience the color blue. They didn't even have a word for it.

Ellie: 45:43

Oh, I, I think I've heard this, even though I did not know that Prime Minister William Gladstone wrote a book that generated this theory.

David: 45:51

Yeah, it is from him that this comes. He is the discoverer of the absence of blueness in, uh, Homeric literature. And he bases this claim on the fact that whenever Homer talks about things that should be described as blue like the sea, he uses two really unexpected terms for color. He uses either the Greek word oinops, which means wine dark or wine colored, or ioeis, which is violet. And he says that this is not just a turn of phrase. It's not just poetic license that he's describing the sea as a violet or wine red. This is the only way the sea is described in any of the epic Homeric poems, which probably means that the Greeks just didn't have a concept of blue, and so what we call blue, they would've classified as the same as red, purple, and violet as a single color, which again is oinops.

Ellie: 46:57

So, It's like a kind of version of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, which holds that our worldview is shaped, if not determined by the categories of the language that we speak. So one of the famous examples that's often given, is a language in North America, an indigenous language that has many different words for snow. And the idea that there was such a intimate relation between the people and the snow, that they didn't just see snow as a single entity, but really as like all of these different kinds of things. So the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis would conclude that if you have different kinds of words for snow in your language, you also are not seeing snow as just a single thing. And I know that view was first really popular, then got unpopular, and I've heard lately that it's experiencing a little bit of a resurgence.

David: 47:46

Yes, there's a rebirth the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, and so to an extent, yes, the Gladstone argument about color is very similar. Except that the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis is mostly about cognition, whereas the Gladstone one applies it to visual perception. And so his argument is that the Greeks, it's not just that they lacked a word, it's that they actually wouldn't have perceived blue, and by that he means that he, they wouldn't have recognized a difference and therefore they wouldn't have experienced a difference between a red and a blue, which is why all the readers of these epic poems would've had no problem understanding that the sea is in fact wine colored.

Ellie: 48:32

Although the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis is from the 20th century, Gladstone's is of course from the mid 19th, so I guess the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis would be a version of the Gladstone theory since it came afterwards.

David: 48:43

Yeah, I think that's right. And in the mid 19th century, people really thought that Gladstone had gone off the deep end with this theory of cultural variation in color perception. And they couldn't agree about what was more ridiculous in this book, either Gladstone's Christianization of the Greeks or his claim, which he defends, that they were basically colorblind.

Ellie: 49:08

No. Interesting. Fascinating I might say.

David: 49:12

And even though it was mocked, the theory never really went away as you point out it. It kind of disappeared for some time, but then it's experiencing this rebirth because it is true that when you look at Homeric texts, you get the sense that the Greeks just didn't cut up the color spectrum in the same that we do. And recently in 2010, the linguist guide Deutscher wrote a book rekindling this debate entitled Through the Language Glass, where he says that Gladstone was ahead of his time in terms of thinking about the relationship between color perception and culture. Because color perception is not a given from the senses. And although he specifies that Gladstone's particular explanation as to why the Greeks didn't have a concept of blue was ultimately mistaken because Gladstone believed that the Greeks had not yet cultivated color perception as much as later Europeans. And Deutscher says, no, that's not really the reason. The real reason is because the Greeks just had a different linguistic and cultural frame. So it, it really is a question about the cultural and linguistic scheme that they had in place and how that constituted their experience. And the reason is that for Deutscher, language gives us particular categories, right, that we use to identify objects of experience. And those categories very easily become habits of thinking that shape how we experience the world, even if we're not conscious of that influence. And so language determines what is perceptually sensible and what is perceptually meaningful. And so without a word for blue, the Greeks didn't see.

Ellie: 51:08

Yeah. Although this is tricky because one issue is whether they didn't see blue or whether they just didn't have a word for it and thus failed to name it apart from the other colors, right. It wouldn't necessarily follow that the absence of a world entails the absence of an experience.

David: 51:23

Yes. Although this is precisely what is at stake in the philosophical debate here, can we really experience something in the absence of a category or concept, especially when it comes to color. Or do we experience things that are grouped together by convention as having some essential bond, just because that's how we are used to classifying them. And if it's the latter, then it means that the Greeks would not have experienced blue as separate from red and purple, and that means that they didn't have blue as we understand it. So of course they registered the light wave, but the perception of an object is something much more complicated.

Ellie: 52:04

Yeah. And of course, I mean, one of the difficulties about our linguistic schema is, is that we have difficulty stepping out of them and evaluating their limitations, right? So it's hard to even tell how we would classify things if we had a different schema, could we even step out of it at all?

David: 52:19

Yeah, that's right. And Deutscher doesn't go that far into thinking that we cannot step outside of our own schema into another. He does think that we can move from one language to another. And get a sense of the worldview of other people. And we can do that in two ways. One is historically by just like looking at the color language of the Greeks and seeing how it differs from ours. But another one is geographically right? We can look at cultural differences in perception or in language and see how that produces different experiences in different parts of the world. And there is this guy named Jules Davidoff, who found a tribal community in Namibia that also doesn't have a word for blue. And he gave them the following perceptual test. He showed them a bunch of squares that were all green. Except one of them was blue. Now, for you and I, it's a very easy judgment call. Which one is the one that is different? When he asked them to identify which square doesn't fit into the series, the research subjects just took a very long time, and in some cases couldn't actually identify the one that didn't belong in the category. So the absence of a word does translate into a different kind of judgment. Now, of course, one could say, oh, well, you know, this is an arbitrary Western scientific experiment that they're not used to. So maybe there is, you know, there are other artifices here that could explain that result. But then David off changed the experiment a little bit because the members of the tribe in Namibia have a lot of words for different kinds of green. You earlier mentioned, you know, different words for different kinds of snow. Here this community, for whatever historical reasons, just has a lot of different words for different shades of green. So he gave them a series of squares that are all green, except that one of them is just a tiny, tiny, tiny bit lighter green than the rest of the squares. I swear to you Ellie, I could not spot the one

Ellie: 54:32

Mm.

David: 54:33

in the series. Like I looked at it for like a good two, three minutes and I just couldn't tell.

Ellie: 54:39

Oh, you gotta send it to me after.

David: 54:41

I'll send it. And the members of this tribe spotted it right away. And so you know, it again, it seems like differences in culture and language do translate into differences at the level of perception, judgment, and action. Obviously, I register the light wave for this particular kind of green. I just couldn't differentiate it from the others.

Ellie: 55:09

I think that really raises questions about the limits of sight as a form of perception versus the interpretation of what we're seeing versus the ways that we explore that interpretation or explain it or express it through language. And on that note, I might say that it's in a word fascinating. Thank you, David, thanks.

David: 55:32

Well we hope you enjoy today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Ellie: 55:43

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David: 55:49

To reach out to us and find episode info, go to overthinkpodcast.com and connect with us on Twitter and Instagram @overthink_pod.

Ellie: 55:59

We'd like to thank our audio editor, Aaron Morgan, our production assistant, Clare A'Hearn and Samuel PK Smith for the original music.

David: 56:06

And to our listeners, thanks so much for overthinking with us.