Don Juan and the Vision of Vision

Abstract

Castaneda's well-known sequence of Don Juan books is used as a paradigmatic example of the relativist position. Central to Don Juan's teaching is the problem of perception: the main task, he constantly reiterates, is simply to ‘see’, to recognise that the commonsense world we customarily perceive is nothing more than a cultural construct. To combat this thoroughgoing relativism a case study is taken from the early history of visual science. In classical antiquity several fundamentally different ‘views’ (to use Don Juan's term) of how we see contended for approval. It was only at the beginning of the seventeenth century that the ‘modern’ interpretation was selected. This interpretation was selected, ultimately, because it ‘worked’. Reference is made to both Wittgenstein and Marx to support this appeal to praxis. It is argued that through an intricate, complex, and ill-understood process of popularisation our self-image is ultimately grounded in the theories of natural science; and these, in turn, are ultimately grounded in our action in the world of things.