The Philosopher's Gaze

Modernity in the Shadows of Enlightenment

David Michael Levin

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN:
  9780520217805
• eBook ISBN:
  9780520922563
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

David Michael Levin's ongoing exploration of the moral character and enlightenment-potential of vision takes a new direction in The Philosopher's Gaze. Levin examines texts by Descartes, Husserl, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Benjamin, Merleau-Ponty, and Lévinas, using our culturally dominant mode of perception and the philosophical discourse it has generated as the site for his critical reflections on the moral culture in which we are living.

In Levin's view, all these philosophers attempted to understand, one way or another, the distinctive pathologies of the modern age. But every one also attempted to envision—if only through the faintest of traces, traces of mutual recognition, traces of another way of looking and seeing—the prospects for a radically different lifeworld. The world, after all, inevitably reflects back to us the character, the reach and range, of our vision.

In these provocative essays, the author draws on the language of hermeneutical phenomenology and at the same time refines phenomenology itself as a method of working with our experience and thinking critically about the culture in which we live.


David Michael Levin's ongoing exploration of the moral character and enlightenment-potential of vision takes a new direction in The Philosopher's Gaze. Levin examines texts by Descartes, Husserl, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Benjamin, Merlea

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 10
• Acknowledgments
• I FORESHADOWINGS
• Outside the Text
• Blindness, Violence, Compassion?
• Minima Moralia
• II INTRODUCTION
• The Discursive Construction of the Philosophical Gaze
• The Importance of Phenomenology
• III THE PHILOSOPHERS
• 1 Descartes’s Window
• 2 Husserl’s Transcendental Gaze Controlling Unruly Metaphors
• 3 The Glasses on Our Nose Wittgenstein’s Optics and the Illusions of Philosophy
• 4 Gestalt Gestell Geviert The Way of the Lighting
• 5 The Field of Vision Intersections of the Visible and the Invisible in Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty
• 6 Outside the Subject Merleau-Ponty’s Chiasmic Vision
• 7 The Invisible Face of Humanity Levinas on the Justice of the Gaze
• 8 Justice in the Seer’s Eyes Benjamin and Heidegger on a Vision out of Time and Memory
• 9 Shadows Reflections on the Enlightenment and Modernity
• 10 Where the Beauty of Truth Lies
• Notes
• Index of Names