On the Art of Seeing What Is Not Seen

The Necessary Redundancy of Love.

It is arguably the most celebrated quotation in French literature.

It is, at first glance, a pleonasm, that is, an apparently unnecessary repetition of an idea or meaning already implicit in the words used.

There is a rather lovely philological subtlety in this sentence, and I think it deserves more attention than it is ordinarily given. Indeed, what initially appears to be a redundancy turns out, upon closer examination, to be a distinction between two entirely different ways of seeing.

The sentence is from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince:

“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

A philologist might be tempted to pause over the second clause. After all, if something is invisible, is it not necessarily beyond the eye? Why, then, tell us that what is essential is invisible to it? Does the sentence not say, in effect, that what cannot be seen cannot be seen?

At first glance, there is something resembling a pleonasm here. But that impression rests upon a confusion between the physical capacity of the eye and the epistemological capacity of human perception.

And that is where the sentence becomes considerably more interesting.

1. The eye sees objects; the mind apprehends meanings.

The word invisible is deceptively straightforward. Etymologically, it is formed from the Latin in- (a negating prefix) and visibilis, derived from videre, to see. It denotes that which cannot be seen. One might therefore argue that adding for the eyes is unnecessary: invisibility already presupposes an observer equipped with sight.

But language is not merely an instrument for eliminating redundancies. It is also an instrument for establishing contrasts.

Saint-Exupéry is not defining invisibility in the abstract. He is distinguishing between two faculties of apprehension: the eye and the heart. The second clause is not an explanation of the first; it is its necessary counterpart.

Had he written simply “What is essential is invisible”, the sentence would have remained perfectly intelligible, but something rather important would have disappeared: the opposition between the physical organ of sight and the metaphorical organ of understanding.

The eyes are not accused of being defective. They are simply being asked to perform a task for which they were never designed.

2. The curious grammatical dignity of ‘the essential’.

There is another detail worth examining.

Saint-Exupéry writes in French:

L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.

Notice the expression l’essentiel. It is an adjective, essentiel, turned into a substantive through the definite article le, elided before a vowel.

This is a process known as nominalisation or substantivisation: an adjective assumes the grammatical office of a noun.

The French does not say les choses essentielles (essential things), nor does it specify what those things might be. It simply says l’essentiel: that which is essential.

English performs a similar operation with what is essential. Rather than naming an object, the expression gathers an entire category of qualities, relationships and meanings into a single grammatical subject.

This is quite elegant. The sentence does not tell us what the essential things are. It leaves the category open, inviting the reader to supply its contents.

A philologist might observe that the grammatical abstraction is doing some of the philosophical work.

The essential is not a particular object. It is a quality of significance that may reside in an object without being reducible to its appearance.

3. Why the apparent pleonasm is actually a rhetorical necessity.

Let us consider the sentence structurally.

• What is essential establishes the subject.

• Is invisible establishes its condition.

• To the eye identifies the limits of the faculty being considered.

The final expression is therefore not merely repetitive. It completes the argument by identifying the observer.

Indeed, the preceding sentence makes this particularly clear:

“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly.”

There is a remarkable symmetry between the two propositions:

• First proposition

The heart

Sees rightly

Positive affirmation

Inner apprehension

• Second proposition

The eyes

Cannot see the essential

Negative limitation

External observation

The first tells us where proper perception is possible. The second tells us where it is not.

The French construction is particularly revealing. Pour les yeux (for the eyes) is not simply an ornamental addition. It gives the eyes a specific role in the opposition. A linguistic examination of the original notes how the choice of les yeux, rather than the more abstract l’œil, reinforces the contrast between heart and eyes.

4. The difference between seeing and recognising.

Here, I think, lies the most interesting philosophical implication.

One may look at a rose and recognise its botanical characteristics. One may describe its colour, count its petals, identify its species and measure its fragrance. One may even possess a more comprehensive scientific understanding of the flower than the person who loves it.

And yet one may know nothing whatsoever of what that particular rose means to another human being.

The Little Prince’s rose is not unique because it is botanically different from the thousands of other roses in the garden. It is unique because of the relationship that has grown between them. The hours spent watering it, protecting it, listening to its complaints and worrying about its wellbeing have given it a significance that cannot be established by visual inspection.

The eye registers resemblance. Affection recognises singularity.

This is not an argument against reason, observation or empirical knowledge. It is an argument against mistaking the information supplied by the senses for the entirety of reality.

There are things which can be measured but not valued by measurement; things which can be described but not adequately understood by description; and things which can be possessed physically without ever being appreciated.

One might spend a lifetime studying the architecture of a cathedral and remain entirely oblivious to the faith that inspired its construction. One might know every historical detail of a friendship and still fail to understand the affection that sustains it.

Knowledge of particulars is not necessarily knowledge of significance.

5. A final philological observation: the sentence does not waste a word.

There is a tendency, particularly among those who prize concision, to regard every apparent repetition as an imperfection. But rhetorical redundancy and semantic redundancy are not the same thing.

A repetition may be unnecessary at the level of information yet indispensable at the level of emphasis, rhythm or contrast.

Here, the words for the eyes are not there to inform us that invisible things cannot be seen. They are there to remind us that the eyes are not the only instruments through which human beings apprehend reality.

And perhaps the most beautiful feature of the construction is that Saint-Exupéry does not say that the essential is invisible to everybody. He says it is invisible to the eyes.

The distinction is considerable.

He does not declare the essential unknowable. On the contrary, the preceding sentence has already suggested another means of knowing it.

The apparent paradox is thus resolved: what one faculty cannot apprehend may be perfectly intelligible to another.

I should be inclined, therefore, to acquit Saint-Exupéry of the charge of pleonasm. Indeed, I would suggest that the apparent redundancy is precisely what gives the sentence its philosophical precision.

The eye sees the rose; the heart understands why one rose, among a thousand others, matters.

A philologist might call this a carefully constructed contrast between the literal and the figurative senses of perception. A philosopher might call it a distinction between appearance and essence. A sentimentalist might simply call it love.

I rather suspect that all three would be correct.

And there is a small irony in the matter. We spend an extraordinary amount of time teaching ourselves to look more carefully at the world, acquiring spectacles, telescopes, microscopes and increasingly sophisticated instruments of observation. Yet we sometimes neglect the rather older business of learning how to see.

Perhaps the greatest blindness is not the inability to perceive what is before one’s eyes, but the presumption that what is before one’s eyes is all there is to perceive.

That, I think, is what the fox was trying to tell us. And he managed it without requiring a single footnote.