The Eyes of the Skin

PART 1'The hands want to see, the !!yeswant to caress.'JohannWolfgang von GoethelThe dancer has his ear in his toes.'Friedrich Nietzsche2'If the body had been easier to understand, nobody would havethought that we had a mind.'RichardRorty3The taste if the apple ... lies in the contact if the.fruit with thepalate, not in the.fruit itself; in a similar way ... poetry lies in the meetingif poem and reader,not in the lines if symbols printed on thepagesif a book. What is essential is the aesthetic act, the thrill, the almostphysical emotion that comes with each reading.'Jorge Luis Borges4'How would the painter or poet express anything other than hisencounter with the world?'Maurice Merleau-Ponty"Vision and KnowledgeIn Western culture, sight has historically been regardedas the noblest ofthe senses, and thinking itself thought of in terms of seeing. Already inclassical Greek thought, certainty was based on vision and visibility. 'Theeyes are more exact witnesses than the ears,' wrote Heraclitus in one ofhis fragments.6 Plato regarded vision as humanity'sgreatest gift,7 and heinsisted that ethical universals must be accessible to 'the mind's eye'. 8Aristotle, likewise, considered sight as the most noble of the senses'because it approximatesthe intellect most closely by virtue of the relativeimmaterialityof its knowing'.9Since the Greeks, philosophicalwith ocular metaphorswritings of all times have aboundedto the point that knowledge has become analogouswith clear vision and light is regarded as the metaphor for truth.Aquinas even applies the notion of sight to other sensory realms as wellas to intellectual cognition.The impact of the sense of vision on philosophy is well summed up byPeter Sloterdijk: 'The eyes are the organic prototype of philosophy. Theirenigma is that they not only can see but are also able to see themselvesseeing. This gives them a prominenceamong the body's cognitive organs.A good part of philosophical thinking is actually only eye reflex, eyedialectic, seeing-oneself-see.' 10 During the Renaissance, the five senseswere understood to form a hierarchical system from the highest sense of14THE EYES OFTHE SKINPART I IS