xii. Jones furthermore argues that the privilege placed by Western philosophy on theory is simply a higher order extrapolation of this privileged detachment of sight.
xiii. Indeed, one might understand Jonas' move here as an effort to merge the generalized function of vision (which must be distinguished from the specific sense modality of sight) with the generalized function of touch. Hints in this direction can be found in his discussion of the "mental side" of touch, which is closely bound up with the generalized function of vision:
There is more than mere coincidence in the fact that in his hand man possesses a tactile organ which can take over some of the distinctive achievements of his eye. There is a mental side to the highest performance of the tactile sense, or rather to the use which is made of its information, that transcends all mere sentience, and it is this mental use which brings touch within the dimension of the achievements of sight. Briefly, it is the image-faculty, in classical terms: imaginatio, phantasia, which makes that use of the data of touch. Only a creature that has a visual faculty characteristic of man can also vicariously “see” by touch. The level of form-perception at the command of a creature will be essentially the same for both senses, incommensurable as they are in terms of their proper sensible qualities. Blind men can “see" by means of their hands, not because they are devoid of eyes but because they are beings endowed with the general faculty of "vision" and only happen to be deprived of the primary organ of sight. (141-142)
We shall return to this deep correlation of vision and touch later, in relation to the work of Merleau-Ponty. Incidentally, the differentiation of vision from sight bears on the misapplication of Gibson's theory by VR researchers. As Hillis suggests, the latter seek to extend to, in his terms, the necessarily interpretative faculty of vision, what Gibson says about sight. (See Ken Hillis, Digital Sensations, 126–127; 132.) If we restrict Gibson's theoretical claims to the domain of sight (as he suggests we should), what he says about perceptual invariants begins to make more sense and indeed to resonate with Jonas' similarly biologically inflected claim that "only the simultaneity of sight, with its extended present' of enduring objects, allows the distinction between change and the unchanging and therefore between becoming and being" (144–145). Restricted in this way, Gibson's claims, at least potentially, leave room for processes of reception that would involve the “self-movement" of the observer and thus the role of other sensory modalities.
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