Abstract

The story Heidegger tells of the inauguration of western metaphysics in the teleological impulse of Aristotle’s formal cause is by now a familiar one, and the story of how this metaphysics is also one which privileges the modality of vision is equally well known. Yet what is often forgotten is that Aristotle himself, in de Anima, does not privilege vision in the orders of the soul but, to the contrary, identifies touch as the primary, and in fact the only necessary, sense in animals—essential to their being—while the other senses, including sight, contribute only to their “well-being.” While the telos of Plato’s cave is the ascent into the pure light of the Good, the biological vision of Aristotelian animals, including man, is something they only have because they live in air, and must find their food. Thus, the paradoxical nature of the rational animal: the eye that tries to see from outside its skin.