Invisible Things and Unnoticed Expanses

The social world and the private world are most clearly demarcated when it comes to what is most intimately one’s own, namely the things that others cannot, even in principle, possess. Among the things others cannot possess is one’s own field of vision, where the obstacle to another having it, and thereby appreciating it, simply lies in the fact that two human beings cannot occupy the same visual perspectives continuously throughout their lives. Even more intimately one’s own are the things one sees that no other can, even if another managed to occupy one’s visual perspective on the world. This essay is an exploration of those things, so-called “pure visibilia,” focusing on the question of whether those putative items can be discharged in favor of a common visual language of predicates, true or false, of publicly viewable objects. The conclusion is that they cannot be discharged in this way. The important theoretical question is: what does this mean for the theory of vision?