You've heard the joke, “If you look closely, you see amazing things.” Of course, this is a Yogi Berra quote. Any famous thinker could have added: “If you look closely, you see amazing things.” Instead of seeing things as they are, we see them as we think they are, influenced by our own biases and preconceptions.
This is inevitable. If what I'm talking about could speak for itself, there would be no need to write about it. It would be like living a silent retreat while texting about it incessantly.
Edmund Husserl, one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century, built on the ideas of earlier thinkers such as Immanuel Kant, arguing that we should acknowledge the assumptions we bring to what we see and suspend (or “suspend”) traditional questions such as ‘What is reality?’ and ‘What is truth?’ The idea is not to reject these questions but to ‘bracket’ them, and instead focus on our direct experience and how we actively construct and participate in what we know.
For example, we typically think of a tree as a living plant with roots, trunk, branches, and leaves. By bracketing, we focus on describing what our experience shows us: the color, shape, movement, sound (rustling leaves), smell, etc. of the tree. The same is true of music: we might not think about the properties of sound in order to enjoy music, but rather, enjoying music makes us think about the properties of sound. And so on.
Thoreau said, “If you wish to know ferns, forget botany; your greatest success will be simply to recognize such plants, and have nothing to communicate to the Royal Society.”
A theologian once said, “Monet signs sunsets, God doesn't.” Enjoy the sunset. Don't look for God's signs. Let life speak for itself, don't make it into an analogy. Others may not see what we see. It may clarify or expand what we see. Without it, our view is only our own.
Social and political resonances follow. Analytical perspectives often confuse position and understanding. Take, for example, the demonization of political opponents. Their views, like ours, are often reduced to simplistic caricatures, ignoring the nuances and personal experiences that shape their views. It's easier to take the log out of their eye than it is to consider that there might be a log in ours.
More divisive than anger and disagreement is the inability to see others as they are. My English professor pointed this out to me when I saw a highway sign that said “Caution: Watch out for workers” when it should have said “Caution: Watch out for workers.”
I remember an old cartoon with the line, “I love mankind. It is man that I hate.” Abstraction can be a form of negation, like appreciating a forest without trees or a beach without sand.
Poets talk about seeing the world in a grain of sand. Virginia Woolf saw “the great energy of the world” in a moth on a window pane. Annie Dillard said that by observing things carefully as they are, we can see the world “in every direction, wilder, more dangerous, more bitter, more gaudy, more glorious.”
“What I have always sought is not a description, but a picture. Here is the world, the altar and the cup, lit by the fire of a star that has only just begun to die. Beauty and grace are expressed, whether we feel it or not. All we can do is try to be there.”
– Tinker Creek Pilgrims.
Notes and reading
One of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century – Edmund Husserl: Founder of Phenomenology, Dermot Moran (2005). Moran is a professor of philosophy at Boston University.
As Thoreau said… – Uncommon Learning (1999), Thoreau Society – Specifically the diary entry for October 4, 1859.
Theologians say… – Frederick Buechner, Secrets in the Dark (2007), p. 19. Buechner was an American author, Presbyterian minister, preacher, and theologian. His work has been compared to that of CS Lewis and GK Chesterton.
Professor of English… “Working People” – Andrew Bongiorno, Oberlin College. “Too many people think that art is not something to make, that artists do not make things. For most of them, art is expression,” Bongiorno charged. This idea is “the ultimate folly.” (See Husserl's critique of subjectivism, a prescient rebuttal to the postmodern thinkers who are often seen as his successors.)
“…to see the world in a grain of sand” – William Blake, “Premonitions of Innocence”, Poetry Foundation (1803).
Virginia Woolf – Death of a Moth and Other Essays (1942, 1974).
“Wilder in every direction…” – Annie Dillard, from her Pulitzer Prize-winning nature meditation, Pilgrim of Tinker Creek (1974, 2009), page 181. (The Literary Shema: The Judeo-Christian Vision and Voice of Annie Dillard, by Lori A. Kanitz (2020): Dillard's work is shaped by her immersion in Hasidic and Kabbalistic mysticism.)
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