The Topos of the History of Vision. The Problem of the Variability of Perception and Attention

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Lambert Wiesing
• Subject Area: Theoretical Philosophy ; Art History
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 553452464

The idea that visual perception is subject to historical changes is a philosophical thesis that is only about a hundred years old. For about half a century, it has been extremely widespread in the various disciplines that deal with images and the visual, as well as in philosophy. It is striking, however, that this thesis has rarely been elaborated and substantiated in detail. The few attempts at justification have so far only been discussed systematically in a rudimentary way. Against the background of this imbalance, the project sets itself the goal of bringing the central positions in the debate about the history of vision into a systematic framework for the first time and to examine whether the respective authors are able to present their point of view convincingly. In doing so, it is always important to keep three things in mind: First, what exactly is claimed in these theories of perception about its variability; second, how is this claim justified; and third, is it a philosophical or an empirical justification. The project defends the proposal to differentiate strong and weak versions of the thesis of the historicity of visual perception: Strong versions take the thesis literally, assert the variability of a "style of perception", and establish correspondences to stylistic properties of images. Weak versions, on the other hand, are characterized by their metaphorical understanding of the "history of vision" and by their focus on the phenomenon of variable attention. Insofar as the project argues for the view that both versions contain systematic problems, ist basic orientation can be characterized as skeptical and critical of the used language: First, it aims to show that one cannot know from the appearance of images how people of past eras saw. And secondly, it is to be worked out that in the case of attention, while it is more plausible to classify it as historically variable, there is a danger of encouraging misleading jargon if one equates this with a history of vision. Phenomenology has not been discernibly involved in discussing the topos of the historicity of perception. Specifically, this means that there has not yet been a proposal in the discussion that takes seriously the first-personal perspective of the perceiver. This desideratum is what the project aims to remedy, which is why it does not stop at a skeptical position in ist overall ambition. The final aim is rather to determine the possibilities of variability of perception and attention for the perceiver by means of decidedly phenomenological descriptions.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants