What We See and What We Know

The way we see things is always affected by what we know or believe. Nietzsche said something else fitting to this: “Ultimately no one can extract from things, books included, more than he already knows. What one has no access through experience one has no ear for.”

In John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, Berger describes the relation between what we see and what we know, more precisely arguing that what we know impacts what we see (and vice versa). Talking about the ubiquitous abundance of images and their increasingly ephemeral, insubstantial, and available meaning, he says, “If the new language of images were used

Deliberately exposing the connections and associations can act as a catalyst for this ‘new kind of power’. And when we look back to answer the question, ‘how does one become who one is?’, we can be liberated from the limitations of isolated representations. Let the in-betweens, associations, and the whole web of complexity and connections do the ta

What matters more is how we relate with memory, that is to say how we look back to understand our history and retroactively give meaning and context to our lives

We all live one-of-a-kind lives with a unique set of experiences, and therefore the way we interact with the world is always somewhat different. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a vast amount of overlap, and I think it is exactly this dichotomy that makes life so wonderful. When we expose more of the web (the connections, associations, and representat

The context opens a spectator’s mind to discover the complexity behind what she is seeing. In the end, the “thing-in-itself” is rarely what is most significant. Rather, it’s the connections and the in-betweens that make it all tangible.