Series on Seeing 2

Were the eye not attuned to the Sun, the Sun could never be seen by it. ——————————————————————-Goethe

“For ‘tough-minded’ philosophers, observation is just opening one’s eyes and looking. Facts are simply the things that happen; hard, sheer, plain and unvarnished. We may all speak as we please. A conceptual difficulty, however, lies beneath this talk . . . Most of us talk about observing facts, looking at them, collecting them, etc. What is observation of a fact. What would one look like? In what could it be collected? I can photograph an object, an event, or even a situation. What would a photograph of a fact be a photograph of?

Is a sketch of the dawn a sketch of the fact of which Tycho, Simplicius, Kepler and Galileo were aware? Asking the question suffices. Facts are not picturable, observable entities. Seeing the sun on the horizon involves more than soaking up optical sensibilia. . . . ” —————————————————————N. R. Hanson