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The Inverted Gaze or, on the aesthetic attitude in the study of mediaeval philosophy

Summary/Abstract: In seeking for the answer to the question why we study mediaeval philosophy, this essay tries to enlarge the discussion with the questions how the historian studies and whether he only studies, without bringing in the impulses of his aesthetic and everyday experience. To the philosophy of life, the diversity and interrelation of philosophical systems and approaches is nothing else but the diversity and interrelation of life itself. In this sense, the historian needs what M. Bloch and the Annales school call 'historical sensitivity', the sympathy with the 'tremblings' of the people who have lived in the Middle Ages when, according to J. Huizinga, the vividness and acuteness of life were more delineated and experiences were fuller and more immediate. 'Historical sensitivity' in fact means the transfer of sensibility in which the 'horrible power' of the physical impressions of the beautiful fines out into a spiritual receptivity for the 'beauty of knowledge'. It is this transfer that is spoken of in the erotic way of Platonic philosophy from Plato's 'Symposium' to the establishment of the spiritual senses' in Origen and Gregory of Nyssa. Naturally, the 'most philosophical' sense of sight maintains the ancient and mediaeval meanings of the theoria itself: a seeing in joy, a pleasure of contemplation. here, we propose the interpretation of a more specific aesthetic situation - the inverted gaze that one throws back 'above the shoulder' to take in some kind of overall and important impression of what was previously looked at. the attempt to hold such gazes in which 'the past sparkles as an image in the moment of its recognition' is the experience of which Paul Valery talks - the attempt to 'establish the formulas of enthusiasm, of the tremblings', of a reproducing aestetic attitude to the study of the Middle Ages.

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