Elemental Optics: Nicholas of Cusa, Omnivoyance and the Aquatic Gaze
- PDF / 506,814 Bytes
- 31 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 65 Downloads / 205 Views
Elemental Optics: Nicholas of Cusa, Omnivoyance and the Aquatic Gaze Taylor Knight 1
# Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract There has been much recent debate about the nature of the omnivoyant image that introduces Nicholas of Cusa’s De visione Dei. In this paper, I argue that Cusa’s concept of contraction and his ‘radical perspectivism’ lead us toward stretching the concept of omnivoyance beyond a simple dichotomy between a phenomenology of the image and a phenomenology of the icon. Instead of putting such emphasis on what is seen by the omnivoyant, we should think an omnivoyant optics starting from the material milieu from which it sees. To this end, I define the concept of omnivoyance through the concept of the elemental. Using both the concept of an element derived from Presocratic Ionian philosophy and recent French and American continental philosophy, I put these discourses into conversation with Cusa in several ways: (1) the way omnivoyance functions as a substratum of contracted seeing rather than as a transcendence, (2) its operation as a pure frontality without objectifiable aspects, and (3) the way in which omnivoyance implies not only a gaze that sees ‘all and each’ (Cusa’s formula for omnivoyance) but also a plurality of modes of vision. To help us understand this enlarged concept of omnivoyance, I use the example of animal vision, particularly the gaze of the whale. With respect to cetacean vision, I deploy Melville’s metaphysical speculations in Moby Dick as our primary guide. Keywords Nicholas of Cusa . Sensus communis . The elemental . Perspective . The icon .
The gaze This paper emerged out of a study on Nicholas of Cusa’s De visione Dei that I recently published in this journal (Knight 2020). I wanted to write on the debates about the nature of the omnivoyant icon that Cusa uses as an analogy for the all-seeing vision of
* Taylor Knight [email protected]
1
Institut Catholique de Paris, 188 Rue de Tolbiac, 75013 Paris, France
T. Knight
God. At a conceptual level, these debates concern whether this image functions according to the economy of a traditional icon, or whether what Cusa calls an icona dei has acquired a new meaning: that it is inscribed within the logic of a Renaissance painting.1 At a historical level, these debates concern to what extent Cusa’s icon differs from, or even critiques, Renaissance developments, particularly the development of linear perspective outlined in Leon Battista Alberti’s De Pictura and the new concept of space emerging with a geometrical mode of representing reality.2 In my previous article, I go into more detail on these debates as such. I sided with the camp that did not see in Cusa a radical rupture with the iconic economy and its sacramental worldview. I argued that it was necessary to look deeper into the nature of the background from which seeing takes place (even omnivoyant seeing) rather than focusing exclusively on the field toward which seeing aims and thus on the question of whether this visual field ‘toward which’ seeing aims is eithe
Data Loading...
