Mamy przyjemność podać do wiadomości, że prestiżowe wydawnictwo „Routledge” opublikowało 32-stronicowe studium „Wittgenstein and the Politics of Vision” autorstwa prof. Adama Chmielewskiego, kierownika Zakładu Filozofii Społecznej i Politycznej – rozdział książki „Wittgenstein and Democratic Politics: Language, Dialogue and Political Forms of Lifere” pod redakcją naukową Lotara Rasińskiego, Anata Biletzkiego, Leszka Koczanowicza, Aloisa Pichlera, Thomasa Wallgrena (New York 2024).
ABSTRACT
In this chapter, some insights from the contemporary theory of vision are employed to delineate a conception of political aesthetics. By tracing the evolution in the theory of vision from Wittgenstein’s seeing-as, through Ernst Gombrich’s seeing-into, Richard Wollheim’s seeing-in, to Emmanuel Alloa’s seeing-with, the author contends that while the sense of sight is a natural human endowment, the ability to see, just as other abilities, needs to be learned through a collective process called seeing-with-others. Wittgenstein’s repudiation of his own early view of perception is employed in the chapter to undermine the belief that seeing is a disinterested, impartial, and unbiased cognitive activity. Through reference to Wittgenstein’s idea of the captivating effect of a picture, the author claims that mastering the art of seeing requires mastering the rules of sensory orders, or perceptual regimes, which are sustained by a collective perceptual hysteresis, and which enable one to see the reality in a specifically ordered way. Human individual perceptive faculties are thus inescapably exposed to various influences that contribute to their contents and, more importantly, play a crucial role in the emergence and development of perceptive abilities in the first place. Since all cognitive subjects unavoidably participate to a varying degree in the enactive constitution of perceptual regimes, such interactive processes may be interpreted as democratic, though not in the consensual but in an agonistic sense.