The nobility of sight

The centrality of the eye in particular, and the visual in general, is termed ‘ocularcentrism’ by the intellectual historian Martin Jay in his monumental survey of French philosophical approaches to vision, Downcast Eyes (1994). Although his coinage was novel, it has long been understood that the legacy of Plato and Descartes led to a cultural and philosophical bias towards vision and the eye, involving the flourishing of visual metaphors and models for truth and knowledge, more than any other sense organ or modality. The ocularcentric narrative includes Aristotle's placing of sight at the apex of the hierarchy of the senses in De anima (‘On the soul’) and De sensu et sensibilibus (‘On the senses and sensibilities’), both written around 350 BC. Likewise, Descartes’ assertion at the beginning of his essay Dioptrique that ‘sight is the most comprehensive and the noblest’ of the senses (1965: 65) is one of the most representative single encapsulations of visualistic bias in philosophy, and is taken as a starting point in Hans Jonas's influential essay ‘The nobility of sight’ (1954). Philosophy's obsession with ‘clarity’, with representations, and the fundamental assumption that philosophy's task is ‘to hold, as ‘twere, the mirror up to nature’ in the words of Hamlet, all rely on a form of visual bias at the very heart of philosophical inquiry, something Richard Rorty expounds in his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979). Another essay by Jay, ‘Scopic regimes of modernity’, furthers these ideas about the power of the pictorial and ‘the ubiquity of vision as the master sense of the modern era’ (1988: 3) through rich examples from art history. One danger of such narratives is that they revaluate non-visual sensory regimes and simplistically counterpose them to vision, or elevate them beyond sight. For example, at one stage Jay suggests that touch offers an alternative model against the ubiquity of vision: