By distinguishing gazing from seeing, Marion raises a question concerning what counts as proper seeing. Additional features of this description will emerge in what follows for the moment it is enough to notice that Marion characterizes the gaze as objectivizing the gaze presupposes the autonomy and authority of the one who gazes. In other words, gazing reduces that which is observed to categories determined by the observer. He explains, “To gaze at the phenomenon is therefore equivalent not to seeing it, but indeed to transforming it into an object visible according to an always poor or common phenomenality-visible within the limits of concept” (214). Gazing, though instrumentally similar to seeing, “is about being able to keep the visible thus seen under the control of the seer” (214). IntroductionWhile explaining “saturated phenomena” in Being Given Jean-Luc Marion contrasts “seeing” with “gazing.” Concerning the first he says, “In order to see, it is not as necessary to perceive by the sense of sight…as it is to receive what shows itself.” 2 In other words, seeing allows the alterity of the other seeing lets the seen appear as itself. It can simply suggest that there is indeed something to see, but that in order to see it, it is necessary to learn to see otherwise…. Yet the fact or the pretense of not seeing does not prove that there is nothing to see. William Tate is Professor of English and Dean of Arts and Letters at Covenant College. In their different genres, both Marion and Wilbur call for and conceptualize a “conversion” of human perception, from “gazing” to “seeing,” that would inform and enable compassionate changes in human behavior. The paper argues that the two parts of Wilbur’s poem imaginatively render a similar contrast. This paper draws on aspects of Jean-Luc Marion’s account of “saturated phenomena” to explain Richard Wilbur’s poem “The Eye.” In Being Given and elsewhere, Marion contrasts “seeing,” a mode of perception hospitable to the alterity of the human other, with “gazing,” a mode of perception that presumes to control the other.

Zoomed into wilbur ross shifty eyes