Ocularity and the ancients

A TLS reviewer examines what sounds like a fascinating book on Plato and Aristotle’s appropriation of “theoria” (originally referring to spectators who watch the Olympics and other festivals in a kind of “sacralized spectating”). Along the way, the reviewer comments on recent criticisms of the “spectator theory of knowledge” often attributed to the ancients and finds Plato and Aristotle “wholly innocent.” More fully:

“In both Plato and Aristotle abstract philosophical ‘sacralized spectating’ involves human beings in lots of hard thought and investigation: mathematical and dialectical in Plato’s case, biological and scientific in Aristotle’s. To grasp (not the non-ocular terminology, as frequent in both philosophers as their villified visual metaphors) a Platonic Form of the Aristotelian form of a frog is to have mastered and analysed a considerable complex of phenomena which that Form or form is invoked to explain. Only God gets it all at once without effort. To charge Plato and Aristotle )or, for that matter, any ancient philosopher) with treating knowledge as instant ocularity is a pervese misreading. Their abiding concern is to find explanations of complex, puzzling phenomena. What they ‘see,’ when their puzzlement is resolved and (like ourselves) they say ‘Now I see it,’ is not a single isolated object, however abstract and impressive, but an explanation of how a whole complex of things hangs together The climactic ‘vision’ is well imagined as theoria because it presupposes a considerable journey of preparatory, exploratory thought.”