Nonetheless, I have long suspected that the grasping of such self-evident first principles of practical reason could in fact be facilitated, rather paradoxically, by the camera itself, or by photography more generally. In other words, one does not simply Design significally the camera or photography; one could actually discover that viewpoint needed for Designing the camera significally when using the camera or doing photography.
In a sense there is a kind of “theory” (thea-horao: goddess looking at us first, and then our looking back) in the Greek sense when one does photography, in the sense which Martin Heidegger has retrieved it: a pious openness to what is first being unconcealed to us [by the god who looks caringly towards us], rather than research that is merely our own aggressive and wilful constructive account of things. (see Rojcewicz, 2006)
If true, then this suggests that the camera is a very interesting technology: it is a tool which designs itself significally: Pick it up, use it, and it leads you to adopt the evaluative viewpoint for conceptualizing everything you can see through its lenses, thus opening you to the normative prescription of the self-evident practical principles of natural law identifying what is good and ought to be sought and done, i.e., the truly meaningfully important things in life.
Now, Victoria Welby spoke of significs not only as a theory of signs, but also as a kind of (moral) educational theory, since she believed that the understanding of signs-in-relation-to-values raised our critical and ethical consciousness. (Petrilli, 2009) In which case, the camera is a pedagogical tool just as it enhances significal formation. But not only that, I theorise: the camera is a self-automating pedagogical tool; through using it, one is helped to discover the significant point of view. It is almost as if it automatically unpacks significs, or the semio-ethical consciousness.
Since natural law theory (Finnis, 1980), I have argued (Chua, 2013a), amongst others, is a kind of significal theory, then the camera may well turn out to be the natural law theorist’s choice pedagogical, educational-technology that prepares one for, or augments one’s significal theorizing. Amongst cameras, though, perhaps it is the old film (rather than digital) camera which best affords such significal formation – precisely because it amplifies the cost of each shot, and hence encourages more careful and more serious deliberative evaluation of what is worth capturing.
In my work, The Inquisitor’s Manual, I have recorded some of my own experiences that corroborate such a thesis. The Manual is an open-ended project that is ongoingly in the works. But in the next part of this paper I select, arrange, rework and present the following extracts from some of its chapters that capture and elaborate on the above ideas. In other words, I offer in part 2 of this paper, through these select chapters, something likened to an analytic ethnography (see Anderson, 2006) or auto-biographical narrative inquiry (see Harrison, 2002; Freeman, 2007) into the pedagogical uses of the camera, and in relation to that, the nature of ethical consciousness raising through photography. Specifically, I hope to offer evidence that the use of the camera shapes the photographer’s axiological viewpoint, just as much as it is true (and which is more generally assumed) that the photographer’s axiological viewpoint determines the way the ‘camera’ is used and understood.