'Seeing As' verses 'Seeing That'

    I can see that a birch tree is in front of me; I see the birch as part of Creation. A man with a different inner life might see the birch tree as nothing but a natural resource. A poet or a saint might see and imagine the birch tree – even if they see it as part of Creation – in ways much more profound than I can.

       Walking among the redwood trees of California, three hikers stop to take in the vista. One, a poet, says: ‘The forest is sublime.’ One, a rich socialite, says: ‘The forest is quite pretty.’ A third, the owner of a major coal company, says: ‘Being unsentimental, I would say that is a very valuable resource that is currently being unutilized due to people’s self-indulgent Romanticism.’  

       A kind of philosopher-physicist joins them and says: "Actually, the coal company owner is closest to the truth. The poet and the rich socialite are projecting subjective feelings onto a reality that can only be objectively described by a de-subjectivizing language of science. What the poet should say is rather ‘I have feelings of awe when I behold the forest’ and not just assume his feelings has anything to tells about the forest itself. His reaction tells us only about him. The evolutionary and biochemical scientist could explain the hardware determining this response; the social scientist could explain the social software. In any case, the feeling can only be sentimental: the idealization of reality in fantasy [the psychologist could explain that] to produce some self-gratifying feeling – perhaps to project an image of a sensitive soul onto others or feel that way about oneself. This should be obvious from the fact that you all disagree, and yet there is no ‘reality’ out there independent of all your views except science to refer your disagreement to."

       The sublime and the pretty, being subjective-psychological reactions, have no place in the discourse of science. Thus the businessman is closest to the truth.’ This illustrates how making the language of science or brute de-meaned facts normative disconnects responses like the priest from the real world. In fact, though,  people do use the language of the sublime for sentimental or counterfeit reasons – the critical vocabulary of many kinds of emotional responses (grief, love, joy, remorse, wonder, etc.), the way we test such emotions against reality, is of just this kind: is the response authentic or sentimental?

       I say the poet is right. His response reveals something of the reality of the Redwood forest the others are blind to. That is a view that science can neither confirm nor falsify; it has nothing to do with science as science at all. The poet’s language belongs to the human language, more specifically, the language of love and wonder; the rewriting of the human language by the reductive scientist-philosopher takes humanity out of the language along with subjectivity. There is nothing in the nature of things that rules out in advance that a complex thought-emotion tells us something about the real world. Only by elevating one particular and idiosyncratic way of seeing to absolute status – the one compatible with technological-capitalist interests – does the seeing mind get deformed into a tunnel vision that keeps us from truly becoming better acquainted with reality, perhaps even intimate: with people, places, living things, the universe – whatever. (Acknowledgement to C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, a section of the Philosophical Investigations.)