Something that I find very interesting and that I've made two (now three) posts about on this blog already is the different types of sight. We discovered two types of sight - physical and intellectual - while reading Greek literature. I also pointed out in a previous blog post (the one with the two pictures I found on social media sights) that the different kinds of sight are still a prevalent theme today.
Now that we are reading Dante's Inferno, sight is split into three categories. The lowest is corporeal vision, or literal physical sight. In the middle is spiritual or imaginative vision, which is knowledge through images that have corporeal shape without corporeal subject (ex: dreams). The highest level of sight is intellectual vision, which is defined as the direct knowledge of God and other realities, like love, that have neither corporeal shape or subject.
I find it interesting that the motif of different types of sight has been prevalent in many different cultures across a huge time period. My hypothesis on this is that sight is a very important sense and something that we rely a lot on, so it's something that people in every time period can relate to.
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I think that this motif keeps appearing over and over again is because of the fact that humans understand everything through sight. We gather everything through our senses - our primary one being sight - and use it to understand the natural world around us. We need this sight to see the empirical data around us, and when we can't explain something, we trust that our sight does not lead us astray, but instead we try to rationalize it by accusing the supernatural
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