This study investigates the creation and destruction of a self-assertive modern subjectivity through close readings of metaphors of vision and power in Descartes, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Levinas. René Descartes inaugurates modern thought by effecting a reductio ad hominem, figuring the ego rather than God as the absolute spectator of reality and judge of truth. Throughout his work, he attempts to overcome the possibility of doubt in order to secure control over the contingencies of his cognitive world. Descartes does so by creating a spectatorial position for a detached subject, separating it from the external world. Safely stationed within a point of indubitable self-reflexivity, the Cartesian ego masters his world by positing it as a set of objects and referring these objects back to his own absolute perspective.
Friedrich Nietzsche argues against the spectatorial tradition for establishing a frightened subjectivity who retreats back from the abyss of nothingness into the complacent security of consciousness. Against this, Nietzsche affirms visual modalities through which the self heroically asserts himself. In Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche endorses the engaged, poetic vision of the artist inspired by the gods Dionysus and Apollo. By drawing upon the powers granted by these two deities, the artist can confront bravely the nihility underlying the visible world while producing rapturous, life-affirming illusions. In his later work, Nietzsche continues his critique of spectatorial subjectivity through his analysis of perspectivism. Arguing that the viewer’s will to power creates and therefore conditions his viewpoints, Nietzsche denies the existence of any absolute, detached perspective. Instead, he argues that one should assert one’s will to power, thereby creating stronger, more healthy perspectives.
Influenced by Nietzsche’s perspectivism, Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time consistently correlates vision and self-assertion. Heidegger explains that Dasein exists as the lighted space for Being’s unconcealment, disclosing Being according to the way it visually understands itself. Dasein does not produce this understanding by contemplating existence, but rather by seizing its possibilities and projecting its potentiality-for-Being. Like Nietzsche, Heidegger argues that, to consummate its vision and power, Dasein must confront an abyss of nothingness; it must understand how its vision and power are radically limited by death. By positioning Dasein as a spectator over its existence, however, the public sphere of das Man distracts Dasein from its dread of mortality, preventing it from determining any of its own possibilities. Therefore, the authentic Dasein which projects its ownmost potentiality-for-Being must break away from this mass consciousness and find its supreme vision and power in the very conditions that limit them.
Based upon a lecture course given in 1935, Introduction to Metaphysics attempts to establish Heidegger as the proper spiritual-philosophical leader of National Socialism. This text rewrites the correlation which Heidegger draws between power and the light of truth by inscribing militarism into its language and by enlisting its ideas in the service of Germany’s political situation. Dasein’s self-assertive projection of possibilities transforms into man’s violent exertion of power; Dasein’s transparent vision transforms into man’s violent struggle with appearances. Furthermore, Heidegger applies his ontological analysis to Germany’s national Dasein. Heidegger warns the German nation that the “darkening of the spirit,” the scientific attitude which observes and orders life, threatens to destroy its spiritual culture. To break it out of its complacent, familiar security, Heidegger challenges the German Dasein to take violent risks in order to realize the “inner truth and greatness” of National Socialism.
Emmanuel Levinas’ early work charts his increasing alienation from his former teacher Heidegger as well as his rethinking of visual metaphors. In his 1934 essay, “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,” he opposes the German — and implicitly the Heideggerian — strategy of deriving power from the elementary forces which render one powerless, particularly the forces of history and of materiality. In this essay, he praises Enlightenment thought for positing subjectivity as a spectatorial relationship because the medium of light releases man from his inevitable connection with the material world. After World War Two, Levinas directs his philosophical efforts towards an escape from the oppressive incumbency of Heideggerian thought. Just as “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism” attempts to sever the bond between the self and the elementary forces which ground and imprison it, Levinas’ Time and the Other attempts to break the inevitable link which Heidegger establishes between a general existence and particular existents. In his essay “Is Ontology Fundamental?,” Levinas argues that Heidegger articulates this primordial connection as the lighting of Being’s unconcealment through Dasein. By questioning the primacy of vision and light, Levinas uproots ontology, opening me[1] up to the metaphysical relationship with the discursive Other.
Working from Husserl’s observation that consciousness can be broken up into a series of discrete events, Levinas describes the genealogy of the spectatorial moment in Totality and Infinity. He demonstrates how the intercourse between the Other and myself gives birth to me as an embodied I who, like Gyges, can look out at the world without being seen. Secure in my home, I can assert my absolute dominion over the sensible world by subsuming it within my consciousness. However, when I look at the visage of Other, I see defenseless eyes which look back at me. I find myself unable to absorb the alterity of the Other whose gaze questions my sovereign self-assertion.
[1] See Author’s Note (p. 2) for an explanation of the usage of the first person to discuss “Is Ontology Fundamental?” and Totality and Infinity.