(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Towards the end of the 1700th century, the philosopher Jeremy Bentham introduced what he called the 'panopticon'. The idea was to design the ideal prison, where one would have an overview of all the cells, which were to be built around the tower, from an observation tower in the middle. From the tower, the prison guards could in theory see all the inmates, but the inmates could never see the convict. Thus, their progress to prison would be almost automatic – only the illusion of being observed was needed to make them more obedient and disciplined citizens.
The word panopticon comes from the Greek 'pan' and 'optikos', which mean 'all' and 'sight' respectively. In philosophy, the idea of an all-encompassing perspective was by no means new. That there should be a standpoint from which everything is visible runs like a common thread through the history of Western philosophy. Since Plato, one philosopher after another has placed himself in Bentham's observation tower, and there, from the philosopher's elevated position, he has – at least according to his own statement – observed what is true everywhere and at all times. This position goes by several names.
Philosophy has always freed itself from worldly ties, taken a risk and adopted a bird's eye view.
Hannah Arendt criticizes the idea of an 'Archimedean point', where the 'objective' thinker is placed outside the world and disconnected from all politics and worldly concerns. Others have argued against the 'view from nowhere' or philosophy subspecies aeternitatis ('from the point of view of the universe'). Perhaps the most famous is Nietzsche, who claimed that all philosophy is in a sense autobiographical – and thus subjective, not objective. Immanuel Kant's philosophy is, for the psychologizing Nietzsche, mostly a manifestation of Kant's inner pathologies.
Not a higher theoretical unit
Book here Seeing Double has much in common with this criticism. The preface describes the rock garden in the Ryoanji temple outside Kyoto, where 15 stone blocks are carefully placed in a gravel landscape. No matter where you stand in the garden, one or more stones will be hidden behind another. "To see everything", writes author Raymond Geuss, "one must see twice." The monks who designed the garden would probably realize that our knowledge of the world is limited and can never know everything.
Men philosophyone has always freed oneself from worldly bonds, taken the initiative and adopted a bird's-eye view. The goal has been to arrive at a total perspective, a theory of the world that includes debris and bits, and where the messy world merges into a higher theoretical unity. The generally quite confusing world turns out to make sense. Seemingly incompatible perspectives turn out to be coherent.
Geuss's book is an exploration of the possibility that this "beautiful view of the universe" does not coincide: that things do not fit together, that the multiplicity of perspectives and theories cannot be reduced to a single total perspective, that conflict between different views is an inevitable trend into existence. Since our perspective on the world is always situated, the best we can hope for is to incorporate as many views of the world as possible – to see double, or, more precisely, to acquire a form of fish poison.
In Norway, there is a widespread opinion that dialect is not a deviation, but constitutes a valuable diversity.
The book is an eclectic collection of seven essays that all explore this theme in some way. In the first essay, Geuss argues that Montaigne his essays lend themselves precisely to seeing the same thing in different and varying ways. In the essay "Speaking Well, Speaking Correctly", Geuss addresses the idea that there is a correct way to speak, and Norwegian illustrates the overall point well: There is no – at least not in theory – 'High Norwegian' form of speech that constitutes the yardstick for correct and incorrect speech. In Norwegian, a dialect is spoken, and written in one of two dialects. This does not prevent people from the capital from referring to everyone other than themselves as (more or less exotic) dialect users, while their own Oslo dialect passes for normal Norwegian. Despite this capital arrogance, there is a widespread belief in Norway that dialect is not a deviation from a linguistic norm, but constitutes a valuable diversity.
Pragmatist orientation
Seeing Double is, like all of Raymond Geuss's books, a redemptive break from an information flora where insights usually come wrapped in banal, easily digestible and infantilizing language. Thus Ornament rarely left the cinema without feeling that he had been made a little stupider, it would be good to stay updated on daily news without feeling the same.
Geuss expects a lot from the reader, and the texts contain significant elements of ancient Greek and Latin, as well as German and French (three of the essays were originally written in German), which are not always translated. The feeling of stupidity can overwhelm one here too, but then as a consequence of being intellectually challenge.
According to Geuss, analytical philosophy and liberalism are abstract and distant from life.
Geuss is professor emeritus of philosophy at Cambridge University and has a long career as a critic of analytical philosophy in general and liberalism in particular. According to Geuss, such philosophy is abstract and distant from life – it takes as its starting point an idealized person and an idealized world that does not exist at all, and is blind to the interpretation of historical and social context. This criticism comes out more clearly in earlier books such as Outside Ethics (2005) Philosophy and Real Politics (2008) and Not Thinking Like a Liberal (2022) Seeing Double fits into the same project, but is primarily an argument in support of Nietzsche and his 'perspectivism'. It is a book in which Geuss's pragmaticThe orientation is much clearer than before. The book is full of thought-provoking references to antiquity and the Renaissance. But readers who are not already familiar with Geuss's writing will probably benefit more from earlier editions.
