Ways of Seeing
“The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.”
Ways of Seeing
I picked up this book because I wanted to understand perception. The quote stuck with me because it answered why I chose to read Ways of Seeing. My interpretation is that there is always a gap between perception and language. And then another gap with “truth” or “reality”. We’re always two steps removed when communicating about the world1.
Berger explains this effect by analyzing art and their interpretations. The concept of “perspective phenomenology” is useful because it describes the process of developing human “inter-subjectivity.”
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I’m writing in retrospect (2026-04-15). I never grasped what the quote meant or took it seriously when I first read it. I now endorse metaphysical positions in the same vein as the quote: “constructive empiricism”, “idealism”, “perspective realism”. ↩