Learning How to See Again

Why art is the antidote for a world going blind: a commentary on the words of Josef Pieper

Part 1: Going Blind 

“Why are you here on earth?”

It’s a question that pulses beneath the surface of our lives, a question that has so many answers: I’m here to be a good person, to fall in love, to overcome my peanut allergy, to get to Heaven. The Greek philosopher Anaxagoras offered a stranger answer: “To behold.”

To behold. The word itself contains an element of reverence. To really look at something is no small feat. Words are how we attempt to name what we behold, to pin reality down. And language is powerful; words can strike the truth from an infinite number of angles, and the words can illuminate or obscure, delight or blind, manipulate or enlighten; even the simplest statement—“the grass is green”—fractures as soon as you turn it to the light:

• The grass is green because I watered it with my tears

• The grass is only turf and the turf is quite green

• It’s green because your sunglasses are tinted

• Because it’s been green since March and hasn’t yet died

• The grass is green, but not for long (and that should worry you)

• Don’t get me started on the green of the grass on the other side

The way we name the world affects the way we move through it. But how can we name if we don’t see? In the 1950s, German Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper said, “Man’s ability to see is in decline.” He isn’t referring to physical eyesight, but to “the spiritual capacity to perceive the visible reality as it truly is.” He says the reasons we cannot see are due to: restlessness, stress, and absorption in practical purposes. Above all, he says, there is simply too much to see.

I can relate, can you? How often do we spend time scrolling through a few Instagram reels, only to discover an hour later that the time has vanished? We live under the illusion that watching a video of someone on the Appalachian Trail is equivalent to feeling dirt on our shins; we let the dopamine rush of the video numb the pain that we’re not in the mountains too. We’ve saved 100 soup recipes, how many have we made? We read so much about God that we don’t get to know him for ourselves.

It’s all too much. 

To really see something is rare, and to behold is an act of rebellion. Stop, look, name. Forget about your audience, your followers, your circle of influence. The truth can change us if we look long enough, if we let it look back. It will hurt. It will liberate. It will require humility, discipline, and awareness. It's rebellion against ourselves, who are always in danger of going blind. 

In his book Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power, Pieper claims that humans must “perceive, as much as possible, all things as they really are to live and act according to this truth (truth, indeed, not as something abstract and ‘floating in thin air’ but as the unveiling of reality)—in this consists the good of man; in this consists a meaningful human existence.” I want to have a meaningful existence, but I’m so out of practice. Noise sedates me, content encroaches from all sides, I save another recipe for French onion soup.

If we don’t know how to behold, then we are indeed in danger. Pieper tells us what’s at stake: “How can man be saved from becoming 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 man preserve and safeguard the foundation of his spiritual dimension and an uncorrupted relationship to reality?” 

We know our overconsumption isn’t good for us. But why? Is it simply wasted time, or is there something deeper? We’re made for eternity, but we exist in time, so the way we spend it matters. Ben Franklin, in Poor Richard’s Almanac, said some words I have taped above my desk: “Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time; for that's the stuff life is made of.” The stakes of being a passive consumer are higher than losing an afternoon; we risk losing sight of reality, of the truth, of ourselves. To live on the surface and never become who God made me to be? That would be a great sadness.

So. How do we see again? 

Part 2: Learning How to See Again 

We might think the answer is to get off our phones and have some good old fashioned solitude in the woods, but that’s only the start. Pieper tells us the real answer lies in creating, saying we must “be active oneself in artistic creation, producing shapes and forms for the eye to see.” We are made not only to behold, but also to create.

This is the call of the artist: not to stockpile beauty in the barn, but to freely give it to their neighbor. Whether we write, paint, sing, or do math equations, the ability to create is part of being human. In a culture where influencers lurk on every alleyway, we think we must have a massive following before we create. Not so. Do it for an audience of one; do it for the sake of your life. I don’t write because the world needs another blog, but because I need it. Creating forces me to really look at the grass—not as I wish it to be, not as the world tells me it ought to be, but as it really is. 

I need your eyes too. Every person can spot some of the truth about the world, but not in its entirety. I don’t even trust my own eyes, not entirely. An artist’s purpose is to uncover some new facet of life, to spin it like a shard of glass, holding it up to the sun at a slight turn, enough that the beholder sees what they have never seen before. Think of the author who startles you with their stories or the sculptures that pierce you in the way they seem to say: I see you, I know you, we are one.

Good art doesn't tell the reader what they don’t know; it reminds them of something they might have left gathering dust on the back porch of their mind. Five years ago, my friend Isabel made me sweet potatoes with feta, honey, and arugula. I’d had those ingredients before, but never together. It was the perfect combination of flavor and texture and color, but I needed her to experience the goodness. We need each other to see.

Pieper exhorts the artist, saying he is “called to be a custodian and eager herald of a vowed sacred reality.” The artist guards reality, protects it in a world that tries to destroy it. He relates the artist to a priest, “who is called, above all, to keep alive the remembrance of a face that our intuition just barely perceives behind all immediate and tangible reality—the face of the God-man, bearing the marks of a shameful execution.” There is much at stake.

After gazing at a sculpture of a human torso, Rainier Maria Rilke concluded, “You must change your life.” We always find beauty intertwined with its companions, goodness and truth. They are our ancient signposts pointing to their source in God. Dostoevsky said Beauty will save the world. But to be saved by beauty, we must first learn how to see it. Let us behold, create, and encounter the God all beauty points to. For it is not words but a person who transforms, resurrects, and gives us reasons to keep going, reasons to shout the color of the grass, reasons to hope it will still be green when morning comes. 

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This blog is my attempt to see again. If we learn to behold beauty rightly, then we might be saved. God, open our eyes. 

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