The eye comes always ancient to its work, obsessed by its own past and by old an new insinuations of the ear, nose, tongue, fingers, heart and brain. It functions not as an instrument self-powered and alone, but as a dutiful member of a complex and capricious organism. Not only how but what it sees is regulated by need and prejudice. It selects, rejects, organizes, discriminates, associates, classifies, analyzes, constructs. It does not so much mirror as take and make; and what it takes and makes it sees not bare, as items without attributes, but as things as food, as people, as enemies, as stars, as weapons. Nothing is seen nakedly or naked.
The myths of the innocent eye and of the absolute given are unholy accomplices. Both derive from and foster the idea of knowing as a processing of raw material from the senses, and of this raw material as being discoverable either through purification rites or methodological disinterpretation. But reception and interpretation are not separable operations; they are thoroughly interdependent. The Kantian dictum echoes here: the innocent eye is blind and the virgin mind empty. Moreover, what has been received and what has been done to it cannot be distinguished from the finished product.
Content cannot be extracted by peeling off layers of comment.
Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art 7-8
