The Primacy of Vision in Virgil's Aeneid

Chapter 6: Conclusion: Ante ora parentum

chapter 6 Conclusion ante ora parentum n During the early to middle Augustan age whenVirgil was writing the Aeneid, Rome was in the midst of a generally positive period. Civil wars had ended, and the emperor’s extensive building program was well underway. Romans were seeing the tangible symbols of a new order, and the sights they beheld underscored the constructive aspects of the pax Augusta. The doors of the temple of Janus were closed, old structures were being refurbished while new were being built, and there was an aura of security and optimism. The first emperor used monuments to reach the widest possible audience, for the Augustan settlement was confirmed by what was visible. The optimism that this visible message generated can be fruitfully considered in the light of Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of vision, which gives sight the primary place in humankind’s construction of reality. Such primacy of vision contrasts with the negative gaze that in Merleau-Ponty’s own time stemmed from his contemporary Sartre, later to be adopted and enhanced by Lacan.1 Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of vision, by contrast, is certainly more positive and perhaps even more natural. My use of the word ‘‘natural’’ when referring to Merleau-Ponty’s views is based on a loose connection between his phenomenological theory and the natural philosophy of the ancient atomists such as Democritus, Philodemus, or Lucretius. Yet this connection is, perhaps, not so tenuous as one might guess, for Merleau-Ponty himself saw it: One has to admit a sort of truth in the naïve descriptions of perception: εἴδωλα or simulacra, etc. the thing of itself giving perspectives, etc. But all this takes place in an order that is no longer that of objective Being, that is the order of the lived or the phenomenal which is 176 Conclusion precisely to be justified and rehabilitated as the foundation of the objective order.2 Merleau-Ponty wanted to rehabilitate the ancient principles of atomism and to connect them with his own version of a ‘‘down-to-earth’’ phenomenological philosophy. This so-called rehabilitation was the elevation of vision to primary status among the senses, which resulted in his establishment of it as the quintessential means by which to define the human experience: Vision is not a certain mode of thought or presence to self; it is the means given me for being absent from myself, for being present at the fission of Being from the inside, the fission at whose termination, and not before, I come back to myself.3 Here Merleau-Ponty offers his version of a spiritual transcendence, but not one that goes to the level of the God’s-eye view. Rather, it is tied to and con- firmed by the reality of what is seen. The confirmation of one’s surroundings by vision allows the person who sees ‘‘to return to himself,’’ thereby establishing and confirming the person’s existence through clear perception of present circumstances. Such perception is Merleau-Ponty’s ‘‘order of the lived or the phenomenal,’’ which provides ‘‘the foundation of the objective order’’ cited above. Merleau-Ponty’s work offers a general guideline for considering Virgilian characterization: Aeneas, as voyant-visible, defines his reality on the authority of what he sees. Merleau-Ponty’s ideas also allow us to consider Virgil generally, his text as a whole, and the milieu in which Virgil lived and wrote, for among Merleau-Ponty’s many metaphors is that of the painter who, as an artist, uniquely participates in vision. ‘‘The painter,’’ Merleau-Ponty writes, ‘‘whatever he is, while he is painting practices a magical theory of vision.’’ The painter ‘‘celebrates . . . visibility’’ and, with a sense of informed wonder, ‘‘lives in fascination’’ of the world, for ‘‘the hand that paints is the same hand that touches worldly things.’’4 In my analysis of vision in the Aeneid, I have generally regarded Virgil as such a painter, and the Aeneid as his canvas. When Virgil puts the final brushstroke on that canvas, vision emerges as a driving force within the narrative. In killing Turnus before the eyes of the Italians (12.928, 937) Aeneas fulfills the pronouncement he made when we met him in the first book. There he proclaimed those who had died on the plains of Troy to be three and four times blessed, better off than he and his men, who appeared likely to die in obscurity on the sea...