Sight and Insight

You can still find grammar teachers here and there whose answer to a student’s I don’t get it is just keep reading. You’d think teachers would have an objective reply—that’s a transitive verb and this is its direct object—but sometimes, at the higher reaches of a subject (and of teaching certainly), the best answer, after the objective one, is the unobjective, leaning on that mysterious ability we humans have to discern or sense or taste the fuller meaning of what we first encounter. And in this regard it’s no coincidence that some languages use the same word to mean both taste and understand: Latin’s verb sapere does just that, and it has given English the adjective sapid, meaning savory, and the noun sapience, meaning full of knowledge or wise. It’s what the chef, the master, does in tasting the sauce and then pinching, not measuring, the salt it needs.

I reflect on this because I really don’t know how else one could finally explain, as a student asked me recently to explain, the subtle but meaningful difference between these two sentences: I hate to see him unhappy, and I hate seeing him unhappy. We can do the grammar, but a correct analysis of sentence structure and syntax leaves us but halfway home; we hear the note but not its overtones, and it’s in those harmonics that we can really sense the living meaning of the sentences and the difference between them.

First, though, we do need the grammar. Both sentences are simple, meaning they comprise just one independent clause. The subject of each is the pronoun I, and the verb is the transitive hate. Transitive verbs attract a direct object, and there begins the formal difference between the two statements. In the sentence I hate to see him unhappy, the infinitive to see stands as the direct object of the transitive hate; in I hate seeing him unhappy, it is the gerund seeing that assumes that same role. That difference of direct objects, infinitive and gerund, is the only grammatical difference between the two sentences. Either is correct if correct means consonant with the formal rules of grammar and structure today.

But meaning, or percipience, that richer and subtler sense of things, lies within the form of a sentence when its structure is correctly understood, when we see what it is pointing to as it is used in a lived moment. The grammar, that is to say, reverberates; it casts a light that reflects off the many objects that every context implicitly assumes. This is why we have both to read and read through a sentence until we come upon the field in which the bare meaning of the words takes life amidst the circumstances. To say I hate to see him unhappy in a context in which I am still deciding whether to take some action or not is to suggest that he might as a result of my action be unhappy, but not necessarily so. But to say I hate seeing him unhappy in that same context would mean that he will certainly and inevitably be unhappy because of what action I am considering to take. The difference, marked in the grammar as it is used within a context, is, then, between the possible and the inexorable, two different meanings indeed.

And how would we know this if there’s nothing in the grammar to point objectively to this logical distinction? By reading and seeing and reading and noting, again and again, what goes on around the grammar as it is used in lived experience. Literature intends to replicate such moments, actual or imagined, to complement the understanding we sense as we ourselves in life hear the same formal structures. The grammar of the sentences arranges the light, the intention of the moment, in differently reflecting ways, and our intellect, paying attention more and more to the details and assumptions of that moment, catches the sense, the gist, the essence, as it is present. This we refer to as the insight of sight.

And, in fact, this is the subject and work of the humanities, those documents of our humanness, of the things that pertain to human beings as human beings. Such discernment is our specific difference from other beings in the world—a difference of some special urgency now as we inexorably press on into an artificial, nonhuman world of our own making.

***