Seeing and Subjectivity

Abstract

Seeing and Subjectivity is a search for the emergence of subjectivity within our abilities to see. The book argues that if we are to make sense of ourselves as subjective creatures we must recognize that the notion of presentation which undergirds all our perceptual commerce with the world we inhabit is more complicated than has hitherto been realized. The book distinguishes between two types of perceptual consciousness: ‘ animal ’ perception and ‘ reflective ’ perception. Reflective perception is a sophisticated and advantageous variety of perception, more so than animal perception alone, a sort of perception requiring subjectivity in the perceiver and whose most minimal form is the perception of absence. It is the enhanced perceptual capacity to see what is missing in our environments that explains the value of subjectivity to creatures like us. For it is in those situations that our seeings serve no longer simply to mirror the world of our immediate surroundings; then we are reflectively perceptual creatures. So the book ’ s thesis is that a recognition of the fundamentality of the notion of reflective perception is key to understanding our place as subjective beings in the world. Its existence is most prominently witnessed in our perception of artworks, in poetic experience, and in aesthetic emotion. This book draws on Indian theories about the nature of perceptual consciousness, on insights into aesthetic subjectivity from Sanskrit aesthetics, and from the ideas of brilliant twentieth-century Indian philosophers. The philosophical method employed in the book is an avowedly cosmopolitan one.