LEARNING HOW TO SEE Over again
By Josef Pieper (translated by Lothar Krauk)

from Just The Lover Sings: Art and Contemplation

Man's ability to see is in turn down. Those who nowadays concern

themselves with culture and didactics will experience this fact once more and
again. We practise not mean here, of class, the physiological
sensitivity of the human eye. We mean
the spiritual capacity to perceive the visible reality
every bit it truly is.
To be sure, no human has ever really seen
everything that lies visibly in front of his eyes.
The globe, including its tangible side, is unfathomable.
Who. would ever have perfectly perceived
the countless shapes and shades of only one

wave swelling and ebbing in the bounding main! And even so,
there are degrees of perception. Going below a
certain bottom line quite obviously volition endanger
the integrity of man as a spiritual being. It seems
that nowadays we accept arrived at this lesser
line.
I am writing this on my render from Canada,
aboard a ship sailing from New York to Rotterdam.
Most of the other passengers have spent
quite some fourth dimension in the United states of america, many for
one reason but: to visit and run across the New World
with their own eyes. With their own optics: in this lies
the difficulty.

During the various conversations on deck and
at the dinner tabular array I am e'er amazed at hearing
almost without exception rather generalized statements
and pronouncements that are plainly the
common fare of travel guides. It turns out that
inappreciably everyone has noticed those frequent small
signs in the streets of New York that indicate
public fallout shelters. And visiting New York
University, who would take noticed those stonehewn
chess tables in forepart of it, placed in Washington
Foursquare by a caring city administration for
the Italian chess enthusiasts of that area?!
Or again, at table I had mentioned those magnificent
fluorescent body of water creatures whirled upwardly to the
surface by the hundreds in our transport's bow wake.
The side by side day it was casually mentioned that "last
nighttime there was zilch to be seen". Indeed, for
nobody had the patience to permit the eyes arrange to
the darkness. To echo, then: man'southward ability to see
is in decline.
Searching for the reasons, we could signal to
various things: modern homo's restlessness and
stress, quite sufficiently denounced past now, or his
full assimilation and enslavement by applied
goals and purposes. Yet ane reason must not be
overlooked either: the average person of our time
loses the power to run across considering there is too much to
see!

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In that location does exist something like "visual noise",
which just similar the acoustical counterpart, makes
articulate perception impossible. One might perhaps
presume that TV watchers, tabloid readers, and
flick goers exercise and sharpen their optics. But
the opposite is true. The ancient sages knew exactly
why they called the "concupiscence of the
optics" a "destroyer". The restoration of man'due south inner
optics can hardly exist expected in this day and
historic period-unless, first of all, ane were willing and adamant
just to exclude from one's realm of
life all those inane and contrived but titillating illusions
incessantly generated past the entertainment
industry.

You may argue, peradventure: true, our capacity to
run across has diminished, but such loss is merely the
price all higher cultures take to pay. We have lost,
no doubt, the American Indian'southward keen sense of
smell, just we also no longer need it since we have
binoculars, compass, and radar. Let me repeat: in
this manifestly continuing procedure at that place exists a
limit beneath which human nature itself is threatened,
and the very integrity of human existence is
direct endangered. Therefore, such ultimate
danger can no longer exist averted with technology
alone. At stake hither is this: How tin can homo be saved
from condign a totally passive consumer of
mass-produced goods and a subservient follower
beholden to every slogan the managers may proclaim?
The question really is: How can human preserve
and safeguard the foundation of his spiritual
dimension and an uncorrupted relationship to reality?

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The chapters to perceive the visible world
"with our ain eyes" is indeed an essential constituent
of human nature. We are talking here about
man's essential inner richness-or, should the
threat prevail, man's nigh abject inner poverty.
And why and so? To run into things is the get-go step toward
that primordial and bones mental grasping of reality,
which constitutes the essence of man as a spiritual
being.
I am well aware that there are realities we can
come up to know through "hearing" lonely. All the
aforementioned, it remains a fact that merely through seeing,
indeed through seeing with our own eyes, is our
inner autonomy established. Those no longer able
to see reality with their ain eyes are equally unable
to hear correctly. It is specifically the man
thus impoverished who inevitably falls prey to the
demagogical spells of any powers that exist. "Inevitably",
because such a person is utterly deprived
even of the potential to keep a disquisitional distance
(and hither we recognize the direct political relevance
of our topic).

The diagnosis is indispensable yet merely a first
step. What, then, may be proposed; what can be
washed?
We already mentioned unproblematic abstention, a regimen
of fasting and abstinence, past which we
would try to go along the visual racket of daily inanities
at a altitude. Such an approach seems to me
indeed an indispensable first step but, all the same,
no more than the removal, say, of a roadblock.
A amend and more immediately effective remedy
is this: to exist active oneself in artistic cosmos, producing
shapes and forms for the middle to see.
Nobody has to discover and study the visible
mystery of a human face more than the one who
sets out to sculpt it in a tangible medium. And this
holds true not merely for a manually formed prototype.
The verbal "image" equally well can thrive merely when
information technology springs from a higher level of visual perception.
We sense the intensity of observation required
simply to say, "The daughter's eyes were gleaming like
wet currants" (Tolstoy).
Before you can express anything in tangible
class, you beginning need optics to see. The mere endeavour,
therefore, to create an artistic course compels
the artist to take a fresh look at the visible
reality; it requires authentic and personal observation.
Long before a creation is completed, the artO
ist has gained for himself another and more intimate
achievement: a deeper and more receptive
vision, a more than intense sensation, a sharper and
more discerning understanding, a more patient
openness for all things tranquility and camouflaged,
an eye for things previously disregarded. In short:
the artist will exist able to perceive with new eyes the
abundant wealth of all visible reality, and, thus
challenged, additionally acquires the inner chapters
to absorb into his mind such an exceedingly
rich harvest. The capacity to see increases.