Perhaps the most striking feature of Pythagoreanism is the sheer variety of in dividua ls associa... more Perhaps the most striking feature of Pythagoreanism is the sheer variety of in dividua ls associated with the tradition.1 One need only glance at Iamblichus' vast catalogue (VP 267) to be impressed: assembled here are doctors, musicians, astronomers, athletes, women, politicians, poets, ph ilosoph ers of all stripes, and many non-philosophers. At the same time, the origin myth of Pythagoreanism tells of a single godlike leader, whose word is law, acting at the head of a com munity so unifie d as to take all things in common . Such a tradition is a Hydra: an imp ossibility, ye t seemingly reinvigorated by every new swipe of the philol ogist's knife. There is a certain logic, then, to the early modern identification of
s famous phrase, landscape is a 'way of seeing'. 2 One can consider 'seeing' here from various an... more s famous phrase, landscape is a 'way of seeing'. 2 One can consider 'seeing' here from various angles and at various levels of abstraction; seeing might sometimes be a form of touch, for example. But always, as a way of seeing, landscape is some configuration of nature and culture, object and subject. In debate at the theoretical level, however, about the form of this configuration, there is a tendency for different points of view to hold themselves outside the nature-culture relation that they set out to envision. While this withdrawal is perhaps the prerogative of theory, it is also important to analyse how even apparently abstract and theoretical formulations of just what seeing means are themselves embedded in landscape. In this essay I consider in particular the polemics issued by and addressed to the theorists gathered under the banner of 'phenomenology', a way of seeing landscape that originates in the eighteenth century. If we trace the controversy over phenomenology to its origins, we find that the theoretical concerns that propel the controversy are entangled in the particular landscape of Greece. I argue, specifically, that the conflict between landscape's theoretical forms is inscribed in this landscape by the singular quality of its natural light. In the case of Greece, landscape is not only a particular way of seeing: it is a way of seeing vision itself.
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Papers by Samuel Galson