Witnessing Others, or Soft Eyes

danielcoffeen's Podcast

Seeing is not neutral or natural: it is taught. As John Berger argued in his incredible, Ways of Seeing, men have a tendency to gaze at women, at life, with a certain will to penetrate, dominate, and such — the so-called 'male gaze.'
To see is to be undone, necessarily. Seeing takes place in the middle voice. Ask yourself: is seeing active or passive? Do you see that tree? Is that tree having its way with you? The phallic gaze is an attempt to wrest control from the world, a transparently absurd gesture.
The painter, psychoanalyst, and theorist, Bracha Ettinger, posits a different gaze, what she called the matrixial gaze, coming from the womb: a pre-subjective mode of holding the other as constitutive of oneself.
I refer to to this as 'soft eyes' which I borrow from The Wire: to see generously, without judgement. I also reference Merleau-Ponty's The Intertwining.