Sight, in addition to furnishing the analogues for the intellectual upperstructure, has tended to serve as the model of perception in general and thus as the measure of the other senses. But it is in fact a very special sense. It is incomplete by itself; it requires the complement of other senses and functions for its cognitive office; its highest virtues are also its essential insufficiencies.15
In accord with this basic position, Jonas' demonstration pursues two main tasks: 1) to explain how, and at what cost, sight acquires its “nobility"; and 2) to embed sight within a larger sense ecology in which the role of other sensory modalities, and especially touch, is shown to be fundamental.
Schematically put, the privilege of sight stems from its role as the sense, par excellence, of “the simultaneous or the coordinated, and thereby of the extensive" (136). Unlike hearing and touch, which are both proximate senses that build up their manifolds in time, sight presents us with an “instantaneous survey of the whole field of possible encounters" (145). What is more, because of this unique capacity, sight is characterized by two additional factors that inform its alleged “nobility”: the “neutralization of the causality of sense-affection” and “distance in the spatial and mental senses" (136). In sum, then, sight achieves its nobility" because of its detachment from the domain of affective causality and sensory proximity.xii
This detachment accounts for a certain gain—namely, the concept of objectivity—“of the thing as it is in itself as distinct from the thing as it affects me," and with it, the "whole idea of theoria and theoretical truth." Yet it also involves a necessary loss: “the elimination of the causal connection from the visual account" (147). Despite the pretensions of sight to autonomy, this elimination introduces a certain insufficiency that requires supplementation from other sensory registers. In a way that effectively suppresses the “very feature which makes these higher developments (i.e., the concept of objectivity and theory) possible," this elimination fundamentally saps visual objects of any “force-experience' that could account for their interconnection with one another and with the observer:
The pure form-presentation which vision affords does not betray its causal genesis, and it suppresses with it every causal aspect in its objects because their self-containedness vis-à-vis the observer becomes at the same time a mutual self-containedness among themselves. No force-experience, no character of impulse and transitive causality, enter into the nature of image, and thus any edifice of concepts built on that evidence must show the gap in the interconnection of objects which Hume noted (147, emphasis added).
EMBODYING VIRTUAL REALITY
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