Seeing All There Is To See
Reports of an impending snowstorm elicit very different responses in our house. I go digging through the shed for the rock salt and start grumbling about how much shoveling I have in store. My daughter, on the other hand, pulls out her sled and starts imagining trips down the hill in the backyard. I am all aversion; she is all elation. Nothing quite drives home the gulf between the perspectives of childhood and adulthood like the prospect of snow.
That gulf only grows more pronounced once the snow has fallen (and once the shoveling has been completed) and we head out to the backyard for some sledding. The path down the hill curves ever so narrowly between the edge of a rock wall, and then a log, and then the patio. It takes some practice to slide to the bottom without bumping into any of these. So as she takes her place on the sled, waiting for my push to get her started, I am anxiously calculating the exact force and trajectory required to get her down the hill safely, and she, well, she is just anxious to get started. As she darts through the snow, I am all concern, she is all exhilaration.
I have in mind something specific in that word concern, something like what Heidegger meant by the term. He wanted to call our attention to the significance that other things, and other people, have for us by virtue of our relationships with them. What he called the “facticity” of those relationships ensures that the world shows up for us as a realm of meaning. We do not perceive things, and then construct their meaning; rather, that meaning is intrinsic in some real way to the original acts of perception.
A father watching his daughter zoom round the bend of a snowy embankment is not perceiving a mass of pink and giggles accelerating through a certain plane at a certain velocity, upon which, by some recondite act of volition, he imposes the kinds of meaning that would justify emotions of solicitude. Only the most violent dogmatism would make a man construe his thoughts in this manner. What a father sees – what the most aboriginal level of his perception reveals to him – is his child, a locus of pain, speeding past a set of potentially painful obstacles; what he sees is the being with which his being is bound endangered by elements somehow foreign to the both of them; what he sees is the proper center of his love and responsibility. She is a daughter all the way down. Nothing in his emotions is contrived or imagined. Nothing is superadded. His feelings of concern are feelings resulting from the tremendous meaning of what he apprehends. They are not constructed exclusively in his mind, but arise from his mind’s insight into the nature of things.
The doctrine that values are something imposed by the human mind upon a value-less external world is one that is central to modernity. It captures perhaps the quintessence of modernity. The idea was expressed in its most lasting form by Hume, with his infamous argument about the impossibility of deriving “oughts” from “is’s,” but it has been cast in a variety of shapes since then. Today, it persists in the common post-modern dogma which dismisses all interpretations of the world’s meaningfulness as so many “narratives” arbitrarily concocted by the powerful to serve their own ends, and laid like a veneer over the blank nullity of reality. In all its forms, this kind of argument always starts with a materialist conception of nature, one which excludes the categories of the good and the beautiful from a complete account of things, and then proceeds to reduce all conceptions of the good and the beautiful to so many delusive projections of the human mind upon a frame of reality too meaningless for humans to face candidly.
There are powerful philosophical objections to this way of conceiving things, the most compelling of which take aim at that materialist conception of nature lying at the root of the fallacy. But what strikes me about this whole way of thinking about the question of value is how unbelievably distant it is from the lived experience of all human beings. Hume may scoff all he likes at the prospect of deriving a moral responsibility from any factual state of affairs, but a mother cradling her new-born’s frail head against her breast, or a firefighter rushing towards a child’s call at the end of a smoky hallway, knows – as well as anything human can be known – that the concern they feel in that situation emerges from the nature of the situation itself, and the relationships involved in that situation. Nothing is being derived at all; rather, the nature of these situations is being accurately perceived. The values that impinge upon the actors in these scenarios are not derived from the facts, but are one aspect of the facts that are beheld. The thing being perceived is a meaningful thing; the state of affairs being apprehended is one that enjoins a duty. The ought’s show up with the is’s as clearly and undeniably as the sunlight with the dawn.
What is needed then is not one more philosophical rejoinder to the doctrine of imposed value. By seeking such rejoinders we implicitly grant Hume’s assumption of derivation – rather than perception – as the mode through which we understand the value of things. We only risk losing our way chasing after the fugitive error, rather than keeping it locked up in its cage to begin with. So much of the history of modern philosophy consists of exactly this piling of error upon error, as one fallacy is rectified by the propagation of the next. This why vague appeals to “Western Civilization” will not carry us very far at all towards a remedy for our cultural ills, since for the last several centuries, western civilization has been – among many other things – the scene of spiraling spiritual and intellectual confusion.
What is needed is in fact some means of both purifying and enlarging our capacities of perception. The mind that looks into the world and finds there only masses and velocities is simply not seeing properly. Conceptions of nature which propound a realm of valueless forces are conceptions rooted in narrow perspectives, more so than in faulty lines of reasoning. What we require is some means of augmenting our capacity to gaze truthfully upon our own experience and to articulate all that is encompassed in that experience.
This points to the primacy of prayer and poetry as resources for the reclamation of our culture. What is crucial about prayer is that it preserves and enhances that aboriginal concern that Heidegger posited as a basic contour of human experience – the meaningful disposition towards a meaningful world which shows up so readily in our common interactions with the world. What is crucial about poetry is that it possesses the power to articulate the stirrings of that disposition as it is prompted by specific worldly phenomena, and thus to strengthen the intuition that the good and the beautiful inhere, in some manner, in things themselves. Long immersion in these disciplines trains the vision of the soul to see what is there to see in experience, the goodness and the beauty that truly inhere in the world that stands before us. To the soul thus formed, the assertion that we ourselves are the originators of that goodness and beauty is no less blasphemous than it is preposterous. It is flagrantly at odds with perception, as much as to suppose the birds dart skyward at our bidding.
I have in mind the effects stemming from a long course of formation in which prayer and poetry occupy a primary role, but I can hint at these effects with just a couple of examples. When the Psalmist professes that “the heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament sheweth knowledge,” he reminds us that the very sight of the stars in the night sky is a vision of the visible vestiges of God’s handiwork. They have no speech nor language; their voice is not heard. Yet their meaning goes out “to the end of the world” the moment we gaze upon them. When a person speaks to us, it requires an act of interpretation to understand what it is they are saying. But to know that they are speaking requires an act of perception. The act of meaning is first perceived, then interpreted. Similarly, the Psalmist wants to claim that the basic meaningfulness of the starry night is there to see, and if you do not see it, you are blind. When you look up in the firmament, you see the dazzling frame under which human experience unfolds, in its glaring, unmistakable contingency. You see - as the most palpable fact you can see – the not-having-to-be-ness of the sky and all it encompasses. All the facts about the stars’ evolution and their chemical make-up come well after this first fact, the fact of their very existence. Of course we feel awe and reverence when we look up, because those are the emotions elicited by the gratuitous beauty of what we see. If we did not feel those emotions, it would be a clear sign that we are seeing amiss, that we are overlooking the one massively significant fact about what it is we are seeing. To pray this psalm, then, is to confirm the orientation of our wills in their primal and proper concern for the beauty of the firmament, and all that it contains.
Likewise, when we read Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29, we find that the poet explicitly claims that his lover perceives in him (“in me thou see’st”) the mortality which will rob her of his presence in no long time. That perception is articulated through a series of metaphors – involving, respectively, late autumn, twilight, and a dying fire – that are employed to capture the full weight and pathos of that realization, in a way that unadorned literal language cannot do. Awareness of the transient nature of the poet’s vitality and beauty serves to heighten the intensity of his lover’s affection, since she knows she has but fleeting time to cherish them. Once more, the poet is explicit in his claim that this awareness, and its concomitant intensification of her love, are something that she sees: “This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong / To love that well which thou must leave ere long.” She sees this mortal being, in his grace and vigor, and she sees the tenuity of that very grace and vigor, and she is moved towards a more impassioned concern towards him as a result. All of this is entailed in a proper description of what it is she sees when she sees the man she loves. To read Shakespeare’s poem is to imbibe in some small part that same power to see all that it is we see in those we love.
These are small examples, but I hope they point to the sort of unique spiritual efficacy that prayer and poetry have to offer our own era, with its special superstitions about imposed values. When our culture at last revives from its torpor, and turns again into a vehicle fit for the formation of free minds and free hearts, it will be because men and women go praising and singing in the right way once more, and in those hymns preserve their first vision of the world.
They will certainly have considerable precedent to guide them in this quest towards authentic sight. After all, there was another individual, who lived some time ago, who went about his own decrepit era trying to awaken the minds of his countrymen by beckoning them to simply look at their world properly, as if for the first time. “Blessed are your eyes,” he said to them, “for they see,” as though salvation was to be found in the pure act of perception, and nothing more. “Blessed are the eyes,” he says another time, “that have seen the things which you see.” As for those who would not receive his teachings, they were men who “shall see, and shall in no wise perceive.” And when, in his infinite mercy, he performed an act that seemed to epitomize the totality of his mission and teachings, he touched the eyes of the blind man, and made him see.