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According to Goethe, you only see what you know, while Novalis thought of seeing as a poetic process in which memory and intuition coincide with how we view the world. Nowadays it is scientists who draw on similar paradigms to explain the world, while the humanities shy away from any interpretations of real space. Yet given that we live in a world increasingly defined by virtual reality, we have every reason to pay more attention to what we can see.

This book attempts to formulate a "poetics of vision" using examples from Plato to Adorno and Blumenberg, and from Goethe to Hoffmansthal, all the way through to Herta Müller. Taking a stand against the abstract theories of modernism, it encourages us to focus on the visible phenomena of the world around us.

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