Seeing Is an Act of Insight

Balthus’s “pictures—like dreams—are journeys unto themselves,” writes Lance Esplung in The Art of Looking. “Balthus does not capture on canvas a scene already lived. He cultivates life within the breathing skin of the canvas, allowing his forms to play out their lives, independently and unpredictably, in relationship to and through the viewer’s experience. . . Painting, for Balthus, was an “Orphic labor,” a way of getting closer to what he called the crack, the mystery, the opening into the unknown – a realm, as in Rilke’s poetry, where reality and dreams are juxtaposed, merged.” 

To look at The Cat in the Mirror I, for example, is not exactly to look at an objective thing such as a “painting” and to see in it certain objective forms: a mirror, a girl, a cat, etc. In fact, it is anything but objective to see The Cat in the Mirror I in such a supposedly-objective way. One may walk through an art gallery handling an audioguide and think that if one listens to the information provided in it regarding who painted what and when one would be looking at the paintings as they should be objectively looked at. Yet it is most certain that seeing in such way (and seeing in general) is (always) a learned way of seeing. Esplung suggests that one can actually look at a painting in a very different way, opening oneself to something else instead. 

We find that sight and, more specifically, our ways of seeing and the emotional way in which seeing impacts us, as well as our ideas, are enmeshed in each other. “Just as speech is an act of realisation, so too can seeing be seen as an activity in which and through which the world is made to appear,” writes Eva Schuermann in Seeing as Practice. The linguistic disclosure of any world is an understanding (even if superficial) of that world, and it amounts to participate in it. Similarly, through seeing things appear and literary come to our mind, disclosing themselves as the objects of our understanding. Moreover seeing discloses the interplay between what is looked at, the social world we are part of, and our individual imagination, memories, and expectations. One cannot see objectively, then: looking at something is always looking at that something and at the mirror of oneself. 

What happens, therefore, when we see The Cat in the Mirror I? Well, it depends on how we see it, that is to say, it depends on the bag of ideas, memories, and expectations by which we may see something in it. “Seeing shows something by making something visible in a particular way” (Schuermann);for seeing is a performance, an action, always social and individual, never neutral or objective: it reflects “the way a person stands towards the world in her character and her habits” (Schuermann).

Hence seeing a tree or a jar is not an innocent task. Seeing is always situated, not only in terms of place but also in respect to the life of the seer. Thus in a tree we can see a natural resource and a usable object defined by its shape, colour, dimension, and suitability. Alternatively, however, we can see in it a life, i.e. not only a series of physical processes, but a relational being more or less messy and beautiful and strong and powerful on which we depend, and to which, consequently, we must pay due respect. Likewise, for a modern a jar is just a usable object lying at hand; and yet a jar can be something else and much more than that: it can be a thing that shines forth (as a jar) and that, in its shining forth, brings together the life-giving earth out of which it is made, the nurturing sky that waters the earth, the safe-keeping gods whose laws demand to give water to the thirsty traveller, and the caring mortals who make the jar with their hands and observe such laws; a simple jar, therefore, can be the meeting point of the earth, the sky, the mortals, and the immortals. In short, seeing is an act of insight. 

Further reading: Eva Schuermann, Seeing as Practice: Philosophical Investigations into the Relation Between Sight and Insight