The Opening of Vision: Nihilism and the Postmodern Situation

by David Michael Kleinberg-Levin

Nietzsche and Heidegger saw in modernity a time endangered by nihilism. Starting out from this interpretation, David Levin links the nihilism raging today in Western society and culture to our concrete historical experience with vision.

Genres: Philosophy

576 pages, Paperback

First published May 5, 1988

About the author

Dr. David Kleinberg-Levin (known, in earlier years as David Michael Levin) graduated from Phillips Academy, Andover and went on to study philosophy at Harvard University, graduating in 1961. He spent a year as Fulbright Exchange Fellow at the Sorbonne in Paris and undertook research, mostly on Fichte and Schelling, at the university in Freiburg im Breisgau. In 1967, he received his Ph.D. from Columbia University, writing a dissertation on Husserl's phenomenology under the guidance of Aron Gurwitsch of the New School for Social Research. He taught in the Humanities Department at MIT (1968-1972), and then joined the Philosophy Department at Northwestern University, from which he retired in 2005.

Reviews

[Evie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I used this book for my dissertation, and loved it! The subject matter is rather heavy, but it is beautifully written.

[Steven · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading this book reminded me of those long ago days when I was a philosophy student and Being and Nothingness and Being and Time started to make sense. The horror. The Horror. It takes a lot of work to get beyond the terminology to the meaning in such works. Levin's book is in the same category. An immense amount of study went into the writing and it will not reveal its value on a casual read. One of Levin's core goals is a critique of western metaphysics: If nihilism is the symptom, then replacing a flawed metaphysics (the cause) with a new one (his) is the cure. In the simplest terms, Levin's approach is to remove the flawed premise; a do-over that he expects will produce a result other than the nihilism he thinks is an embedded outcome in the west's current humanist endeavor. You won't make much headway in this book without first having a basic understanding of western metaphysics and its core debates. You will also need a thorough understanding of Heideggar and Merleau-Ponty, although you could gain that understanding in parallel by meticulously following Levin's references and notes.

[Jordan · Rating 4 out of 5]

One thing one can say about Levin: he seems to be unique among contemporary thinkers to eschew the deliberate obscurity found in so much of the prose coming out of philosophy since the earliest phenomenologists. He skillfully summarizes difficult concepts, especially the later thought of Heidegger, and for this alone the book is worthwhile.

There is much to say about the content of his work. I found his account of the role vision has played in Western thought (and elsewhere) spot on, but I disagree with him and Heidegger that a rehabilitation of a more primordial, pre-Platonic way of "seeing" is the right path to take. I don't dispute the value of this retrieval of (in)sight, and I think modern efforts like Gendlin's (whom Levin admires) are a waste. The way I see it it's the project of humanity's emphasis on vision itself that is the source of the errancy in the thought of all philosophies to have arisen during the Axial Age.

But that's another story.

[Scott · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this in an English-language bookstore in Taipei while I was teaching there in the early 90s. I carried with me on trips to Nepal and Indonesia, and have recollections of spending hours wading through the dense phenomenological descriptions of vision.

I'm posting it today (20+ years later) because a goodreads friend asked if I knew of any writers who followed up on Herbert Guenther's interpretation of Tibetan Buddhism via the vocabularies of systems theory and complexity. Levin came to mind.

Although this book is very much within the Western tradition, there's a curious appendix which is Levin's "phenomenological diary" of a Dzogchen Dark Retreat lead by Namkhai Norbu. Also he does cite Guenther in a number of places.

I believe that Levin followed up this Heideggerian account of vision with similar works on other senses.

[Daniel Rajala · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book so long time ago, before entering more philosophy studies at university.

I found it fascinating and somewhat enlightening, I read many similar writers at that time: Keiji Nishitani, Masao Abe, Pjotr Hoffman etc. They touched upon similar themes and mostly same philosophers that I found relevant at that time.