Originally published in 1989. In this interdisciplinary study, Dr Levin offers an account of personal growth and self-fulfilment based on the development of our capacity for listening. This book should be of interest to advanced students of critical theory, psychology, cultural studies, ethics, continental philosophy, ontology, metaphysics.

First published in 1988. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This is a unique study, contuining the work of Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, and using the techniques of phenomenology against the prevailing nihilism of our culture. It expands our understanding of the human potential for spiritual self-realization by interpreting it as the developing of a bodily-felt awareness informing our gestures and movements. The author argues that a psychological focus on our experience of well-being and pathology as embodied beings contributes significantly to a historically relevant critique of ideology. It also provides an essential touchstone in experience for a fruitful individual and collective response to the danger of nihilism. Dr Levin draws on Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology to clarify Heidegger's analytic of human beings through an interpretation that focuses on our experience of being embodied. He reconstructs in modern terms the wisdom implicit in western and semitic forms of religion and philosophy, considering the work of Freud, Jung, Focault and Neitzsche, as well as that of American educational philosophers, including Dewey. In particular, he draws on the psychology of Freud and Jung to clarify our historical experience of gesture and movement and to bring to light its potential in the fulfilment of Selfhood. Throughout the book, the pathologies of the ego and its journey into Selfhood are considered in relation to the conditons of technology and the powers of nihilism.

This is a unique study, contuining the work of Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, and using the techniques of phenomenology against the prevailing nihilism of our culture. It expands our understanding of the human potential for spiritual self-realization by interpreting it as the developing of a bodily-felt awareness informing our gestures and movements. The author argues that a psychological focus on our experience of well-being and pathology as embodied beings contributes significantly to a historically relevant critique of ideology. It also provides an essential touchstone in experience for a fruitful individual and collective response to the danger of nihilism. Dr Levin draws on Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology to clarify Heidegger's analytic of human beings through an interpretation that focuses on our experience of being embodied. He reconstructs in modern terms the wisdom implicit in western and semitic forms of religion and philosophy, considering the work of Freud, Jung, Focault and Neitzsche, as well as that of American educational philosophers, including Dewey. In particular, he draws on the psychology of Freud and Jung to clarify our historical experience of gesture and movement and to bring to light its potential in the fulfilment of Selfhood. Throughout the book, the pathologies of the ego and its journey into Selfhood are considered in relation to the conditons of technology and the powers of nihilism.

Originally published in 1989. In this interdisciplinary study, Dr Levin offers an account of personal growth and self-fulfilment based on the development of our capacity for listening. This book should be of interest to advanced students of critical theory, psychology, cultural studies, ethics, continental philosophy, ontology, metaphysics.

Nietzsche and Heidegger saw in moderneity a time of nihilism. Starting out from this interpretation, Dr Levin connects the nihilism raging today in Western society and culture to our concrete historical experience with vision: the predominatly egocentric character of vision in everyday life, the world-view of science, the political economy imposed by modern technology, and the paradigm of vision in the discourse of metaphysics. Using the methods of phenomenological psychology and critical hermeneutics, the author draws on Frankfurt school theory and the work of Foucault to demonstrate that the sufferings, needs, and injustices of our world are connected to a mode of vision whose historical character has been determined by the patriarchal will to power.
According to Levin's analysis, the advent of nihilism is both cause and consequence of this mode of vision: the world such a vision produces continues to reporoduce itself, in a cycle of pain and injustice, through the vision it gave rise to. Drawing on the work of Freud, Jung, and Merleau-Ponty, the author emphaiszes that vision is a 'capacity', a gift of nature which can be developed by self-awareness; and he brings out for further development the rich affective, moral and spiritual potential inherent in our experience with vision. Levin argues that the possibility of an adequate historical response to the danger of nihilism requires the further cultivation of our capacity for vision, going beyond the psychology of the traditional ego.
Levin connects these reflections on self-development to a critique of Western metaphysics, and calls for the subversion of its oculocentrism, its egocentric conception of subjectivity, its arrogant vision of Reason, and its commitment to a Principle of the Ground that is not grounded in a vision of the heart. Going beyond this metaphysics, which today ends in groundlessness, Levin suggests a different vision of the ground, based on his interpretation of Gelassenheit, letting-be, as a perceptual experience and a visionary life.

David Michael Levin's ongoing exploration of the moral character and enlightenment-potential of vision takes a new direction in "The Philosopher's Gaze." Levin examines texts by Descartes, Husserl, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Benjamin, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas, using our culturally dominant mode of perception and the philosophical discourse it has generated as the site for his critical reflections on the moral culture in which we are living.
In Levin's view, all these philosophers attempted to understand, one way or another, the distinctive pathologies of the modern age. But every one also attempted to envision--if only through the faintest of traces, traces of mutual recognition, traces of another way of looking and seeing--the prospects for a radically different lifeworld. The world, after all, inevitably reflects back to us the character, the reach and range, of our vision.
In these provocative essays, the author draws on the language of hermeneutical phenomenology and at the same time refines phenomenology itself as a method of working with our experience and thinking critically about the culture in which we live.

This collection of original essays by preeminent interpreters of continental philosophy explores the question of whether Western thought and culture have been dominated by a vision-centered paradigm of knowledge, ethics, and power. It focuses on the character of vision in modern philosophy and on arguments for and against the view that contemporary life and thought are distinctively "ocularcentric." The authors examine these ideas in the context of the history of philosophy and consider the character of visual discourse in the writings of Plato, Descartes, Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Benjamin, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Derrida, Foucault, Gadamer, Wittgenstein, and Habermas. With essays on television, the visual arts, and feminism, the book will interest readers in cultural studies, gender studies, and art history as well as philosophers.