What You See Is Not What You Get
The attempt to produce equality
with what is not equal
will only result in inequality.
The attempt to make certain
with what is not certain
will not go beyond uncertainty.
One who relies only on seeing
with his eyes will be led only by what he sees.
It is spirit that leads to certainty.
That which we see with our eyes
is not equal to what is known by the spirit
–this has long been acknowledged.
But those who are ignorant
rely only on what they see
and take it to be what is common
to all men.
All their success
concerns only what is external
–is this not sad.
Zhuangzi trans. by Hyun Höchsmann and Yang Guorong, Book 32 Lie Yukou
We Americans are biased in favor of what we see. We inherit this from our English forebears. The intellectual tradition of England is renowned for a pragmatic bent. To see is to believe, isn’t it? What one sees is available to be worked with. “Work” is meant both-hands-to-the-plow. Literally getting one’s hands around the issue. Seeing = fixing, etc., etc. See it, and wrestle circumstances to our liking. The American “can do” attitude.
Zhuangzi writes near the conclusion of this compendium of taoist insight. By 200 BC. (when this was written) Chinese intellectual tradition well understood a visual interface with the external world is especially slippery when it comes to drawing a final conclusion.
How can that be one will ask?
Our minds edit external reality into an image patterned according to memory. Mind is artist-like, embellishing as necessary. Additionally reality is usually composed of surface, plus any number of subsurface layers, invisible to the eye.
Force of will, focus of intention is ineffective to achieve satisfying outcomes. We’ve witnessed a piano played by someone. If I sit upon the bench to press my ten fingers to the 52 white and 36 black keys what is bound to happen? Cacophony would arise from the instrument.
What is impossible to see are uncounted hours of mental effort to grasp the underlying theory of piano music, and the muscle-memory melding hand and ear to keyboard, etc.. By means of the invisible a experienced pianist makes music…
The spirit, – a refined inner judgment leading to a degree of certainty appropriate to the matter under consideration.
All else is simply sad.
How about this tune for a Wednesday – Pink Floyd’s Eclipse!
Just one final comment. This from Simone de Beauvoir.
In our private life as in our collective life there is no other truth than a statistical one.
3 thoughts on “What You See Is Not What You Get”
A slightly different perspective. I think that most people in our culture do believe what “they think they see.” The flawed subjective nature of our senses changes reality into whatever someone wants to believe is true. Two people can witness the exact same event from almost the exact same location and come away with completely different perspectives. The main flaw in all of this is that people, for the most part, do not or cannot see past their own prejudices, their own fog of subjectivity to really see the event. My feeling is that this problem is more prevalent in our culture than most others, mostly because we are trained as rugged individualists who must rely on our own take on any situation. No checks and balances just an egotistical belief that our version is THE version.
Community, the inter-personal dialog as a continuous check-up, allowing me to assess whether I am veering off the path, or worse, become ‘lost in space’… Seems to me that is the best we can hope for – to serve as guardians for one another’s sanity and reason.
As humans we believe that our minds, ears and eyes always see/hear what we know to be the truth. In my freshman psychology class my teacher twice demonstrated this to be a fallacy. Permit me to explain. In the first demonstration he introduced us to a member of his senior class. During the introduction a person entered the room started yelling at and physically attacking the senior student. After what seemed like five minutes but in reality was less than one both went running out of the room. He went on to explain that this was an observation test to see how observant we were. He passed out a test and told us without saying anything to those around us we should answer the questions. They were what was said, how many times was the senior student hit, finally a series of questions about what the attacker looked like and what he was wearing. The papers were collected and an open discussion started. To say there was some intense debate would be a gross understatement. EVERYONE thought their impression was the “right” impression. In reality only two of us got it right the other 36 were wrong. As humans we have been trained or trained ourselves to believe what we hear and see is reality. WRONG!