There are Two Kinds of People
To see without alteration is a paradox. To see without prejudice is a kind of moral and intellectual honesty.
There are, broadly speaking, two kinds of people. Those who build a phantasy around any presence and form that is placed before them, and those who, with enough daring attention, attempt to discover what is before them. Not as they wish something to be. Resisting all their projections. Leaving them behind, fully aware, even when the urge is overwhelming.
The first kind constructs meaning almost instantly; they take perception and drape it in pre-formed narratives, myths, or very often (psychological) defenses. For them, the world is never encountered naked — it is always dressed in the costumes of desire, fear, or cultural inheritance. The second kind, more careful in their approach, suspend the urge to enclose phenomena in immediate interpretation. They withhold judgment long enough to permit the object, the event, the other person, to reveal itself in its own ambiguity. There is enough risk of misjudgment in both kinds of mindset.
One can never see something as it truly is. Not entirely. To see without alteration is a paradox, for our very act of seeing is structured by a conceptual and emotional framework that will filter, prioritize, and interpret. Yet the impossibility of clear perception does not nullify the value of striving toward it. To be open enough, to attempt to see without prejudice, without a fixed reality attached to some fantasy, is in itself a discipline — a kind of moral and intellectual honesty. The point is not to imagine that we can see the world from the eyes of the creator (god or otherwise), unmediated, but to refuse the laziness of substituting our fantasies for the world altogether.
Those who create fictions around what they know live with a certain comfort. They are shielded from uncertainty by their own projections, and therefore, from the unknown and any new idea. In a case like this, the world view is stable because it is theirs; every event confirms their private myth. But this comfort has a cost — it blinds the surprise, the discovery, the possibility of encountering what exceeds them top and bottom. They can however, allow small thought developments on occasion. By contrast, those who attempt to see things as clearly as possible, live with a greater discomfort. Their effort to refrain from immediate interpretation leaves them vulnerable, unsettled, exposed. And yet it is only in this vulnerability that something like truth — partial, fleeting, incomplete — can appear.
The distinction, then, is not between illusion and truth, but between two orientations toward reality: one that forecloses the unknown with premature fantasy, and one that listens, that withholds certainty, letting the unknown have its say. The former only offers deformation — but also stability and quick decision — , the latter possibility to a clearer perception and therefore better judgement. To live in the second way is to accept that one’s own mind can be an obstacle, and yet to try to see through it by being aware. Far from restricting the mind, such openness actually broadens the horizon, giving imagination room to explore freely and without boundaries