Chapter 1 of Ways of Seeing by John Berger
This excerpt from John Berger's 'Ways of Seeing' explores the philosophical relationship between human perception, knowledge, and language. It argues that seeing is an active, selective process that precedes our ability to describe the world.
Why it matters
The text is a foundational work in art criticism and visual culture studies, influencing how we understand the subjectivity of observation.
Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.
But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight. The Surrealist painter Magritte commented on this always-present gap between words and seeing in a painting called The Key of Dreams .
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