The Philosopher's Gaze: Modernity in the Shadows of Enlightenment / Edition 1

by David Michael Levin

Overview

David Michael Levin's ongoing exploration of the moral character and enlightenment-potential of vision takes a new direction in The Philosopher's Gaze. Levin examines texts by Descartes, Husserl, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Benjamin, Merleau-Ponty, and Lévinas, using our culturally dominant mode of perception and the philosophical discourse it has generated as the site for his critical reflections on the moral culture in which we are living.

In Levin's view, all these philosophers attempted to understand, one way or another, the distinctive pathologies of the modern age. But every one also attempted to envision—if only through the faintest of traces, traces of mutual recognition, traces of another way of looking and seeing—the prospects for a radically different lifeworld. The world, after all, inevitably reflects back to us the character, the reach and range, of our vision.

In these provocative essays, the author draws on the language of hermeneutical phenomenology and at the same time refines phenomenology itself as a method of working with our experience and thinking critically about the culture in which we live.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520217805
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	11/08/1999
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	502
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

David Michael Levin is Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University and author of several books. Most recently he edited Language Beyond Postmodernism (1997), Sites of Vision (1997), and Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision (California, 1994).

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments	ix
I.	Foreshadowings
	Outside the Text: Thoughts on a Painting by Chardin	3
	Blindness, Violence, Compassion?	4
	Minima Moralia	6
II.	Introduction
	The Discursive Construction of the Philosophical Gaze	11
	The Importance of Phenomenology	19
III.	The Philosophers
1.	Descartes's Window	29
2.	Husserl's Transcendental Gaze: Controlling Unruly Metaphors	60
3.	The Glasses on Our Nose: Wittgenstein's Optics and the Illusions of Philosophy	94
4.	Gestalt Gestell Geviert: The Way of the Lighting	116
5.	The Field of Vision: Intersections of the Visible and the Invisible in Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty	170
6.	Outside the Subject: Merleau-Ponty's Chiasmic Vision	216
7.	The Invisible Face of Humanity: Levinas on the Justice of the Gaze	234
8.	Justice in the Seer's Eyes: Benjamin and Heidegger on a Vision Out of Time and Memory	336
9.	Shadows: Reflections on the Enlightenment and Modernity	408
10.	Where the Beauty of Truth Lies	419
	Notes	435
	Index of Names	491