Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision

This collection of original essays by many of today's preeminent interpreters of Continental philosophy explores the question of whether Western thought and culture have been dominated by a vision-centered paradigm of knowledge, ethics, and power. It focuses on the character of vision in modern philosophy and on arguments for and against the view that contemporary life and thought are distinctively "ocularcentric." Can it be argued that in the period we call modernity this ocularcentrism has assumed a distinctively "modern" historical form? What remains today of the rational vision of the Enlightenment? How does vision figure in the methodology of the social sciences - in its hermeneutics of positions, perspectives, and horizons? Is visualism implicated in the problematics of relativism? In what sense is vision complicit with the exercise of power or the practice of a dangerous politics? The authors examine these ideas in the context of the history of philosophy and consider the character of visual discourse in the writings of Plato, Descartes, Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Benjamin, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Derrida, Foucault, Gadamer, Wittgenstein, and Habermas. Ranging from the philosophical canon to such cultural oblects as television and the paintings of Manet, their essays provide an excellent guide to the many debates around ocularcentrism. All the chapters are previously unpublished except for Hans Blumenberg's classic 1954 essay, "Light as a Metaphor for Truth, " included here in its first English translation. Of equal interest to philosophers, intellectual historians, and readers in cultural and gender studies, Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision will surelygenerate discussion and controversy among all concerned with the meaning of vision in the modern world.