Mary Harris

The things in which we observe with great detail shape who we are as people and how we see the world. As one walks down the street, the things that one puts most of their thought into is going to affect the things that they observe. In our culture today, as someone walks down the street they are probably looking down at their phone or blaring music into their ears making it nearly impossible for them to observe the world around them. People today are lookers rather than seers, as Grey would say in his chapter “Deeply Seeing” from the book Art as Spiritual Practice. Our inability to get out of our own heads, or most likely our phones, disallows us from truly seeing the world around us. Grey describes, “deeply seeing”, as a time when “our minds stop chattering and pays attention” allowing us to truly analyze and think about whatever is happening (72). Deeply seeing is not only crucial to embracing the world that surrounds us but also the world of art. As learned throughout this course and specifically in Tefler’s article, that “aesthetic reactions” are a huge part of interpreting and viewing art (9). Without deeply seeing something, one cannot have an aesthetic reaction and therefore they will have trouble understanding the arts.

Our ability to see “determines every aesthetic decision” because by actually seeing something rather than just looking, one uses more than just their eyes but also one’s “heart and mind” (Grey 72). For example, the pathway that leads to my house was redone the other day, unbeknownst to me, even though I had walked up and down it multiple times since the renovation. I was walking with my eyes open, as humans normally do, and therefore was definitely looking but I was in my own mind. The things my eyes perceived were not being seen but rather overlooked. In my opinion, it is the monotony of our every day lives that stop us from “deeply seeing” because we no longer think our attention can be “arrested by a person, object, or scene” in a way that pulls us back to reality (Grey 72). We no longer expect to be amazed by the things around us and therefore we have stopped trying to see things that seem unnecessary.

I would argue one point that the author makes and that is the idea of “egoic chatter” which is defined as an “isolated, self-absorbed state”, which the author believes stops us from deeply seeing (Grey 72). I believe there is a difference between being in your own head and being in a self-absorbed state. Being in a self-absorbed state is to me, is when a human is truly just thinking of himself or herself and nothing else. Being in your own head can involve a number of other things and people included. One could be thinking of friends, family, televisions, the list is endless, all of which could have nothing to do with them in a selfish manner. Therefore I believe it is not the fact that we are selfish humans who cannot stop thinking about ourselves enough to deeply see but rather it is as if we do not know what to look for.

Grey, A. (2001). Art as Spiritual Practice. The Mission of Art (1^st ed., pp.205-233). Boston & London: Shambhala.

Telfer, E. (2002). Food as art. In Neill, A & Ridley, A (Eds.), Arguing About Art: Contemporary Philosphical Debates (2 ed., pp.9-27). New York: Routledge.