"[Nietzsche] thought that love of systems was a human weakness and that the stronger one’s character, the less one would need and the less attracted one would be to a system. Nietzsche holds that if God were to exist, he would not, contrary to eighteenth-century views, be a master geometer with a universal system of the world. He would see each thing clearly as precisely that which it is and nothing else, and he would not need to use a concept to catch it and reduce it to something else he already knows." — StreetlightX

Nietzsche thought that love of systems was a human weakness — StreetlightX

How does one "see" anything? Seeing requires the reflection of light into your eyeball and your brain to process the information in it. How would a God "see" anything? What does "see" mean in this context? — Harry Hindu

There's a name for this - it's called the Tao - and it's not seeing "each thing clearly," it's seeing everything, all at once, undivided. — T Clark

Is the referenced work the right one for an introduction to Geuss's philosophy? — T Clark

To speak a little abstractly, one of the problems I have with 'seeing everything' is that 'everything' strikes me as too subsumptive, as though 'everything else' were just so much detritus ready to be subsumbed under one big cosmic principle. Too systemic, in other words. That said, I quite like the Tao, even though I find it problematic at points. — StreetlightX

Our human ability to postulate sameness / endurance enables us to conceptualize and count. But it is only an appearance, in a dialectic with 'difference'. — mcdoodle

We love the things we love for what they are.

...what we might call the 'singular universal'... — StreetlightX

There's a paper online by Eric Steinhart in which he discusses one of the implications of this view. For Nietzsche 'sameness' or 'identity' is only an appearance. It's a highly sophisticated appearance. Our human ability to postulate sameness / endurance enables us to conceptualize and count. But it is only an appearance, in a dialectic with 'difference'. — mcdoodle

Yes, I think God is a helpful concept to have, even if you are not theistic. The classical God sees things in their entirety. Objects do not transcend the perspective of God as they do in finite creatures like humans. There is no mediation, no conceptual apparatus, no "filtering". God knows all because he sees all. — darthbarracuda

Nietzsche holds that if God were to exist, he would not, contrary to eighteenth-century views, be a master geometer with a universal system of the world. He would see each thing clearly as precisely that which it is and nothing else, and he would not need to use a concept to catch it and reduce it to something else he already knows. Humans are not gods, of course, and so they cannot attain this state, but that is a failing, not an advantage that they have, nor is it anything to be especially proud of or pleased with oneself for having produced." — StreetlightX

'Istigkeit' --wasn't that the word Meister Eckhart liked to use? "Is-ness." The Being of Platonic philosophy-- except that Plato seems to have made the enormous, the grotesque mistake of separating Being from becoming and identifying it with the mathematical abstraction of the Idea. He could never, poor fellow, have seen a bunch of flowers shining with their own inner light and all but quivering under the pressure of the significance with which they were charged; could never have perceived that what rose and iris and carnation so intensely signified was nothing more, and nothing less, than what they were--a transience that was yet eternal life, a perpetual perishing that was at the same time pure Being, a bundle of minute, unique particulars in which, by some unspeakable and yet self-evident paradox, was to be seen the divine source of all existence.

I continued to look at the flowers, and in their living light I seemed to detect the qualitative equivalent of breathing--but of a breathing without returns to a starting point, with no recurrent ebbs but only a repeated flow from beauty to heightened beauty, from deeper to ever deeper meaning. Words like "grace" and "transfiguration" came to my mind, and this, of course, was what, among other things, they stood for. My eyes traveled from the rose to the carnation, and from that feathery incandescence to the smooth scrolls of sentient amethyst which were the iris. The Beatific Vision, Sat Chit Ananda, Being-Awareness-Bliss - for the first time I understood, not on the verbal level, not by inchoate hints or at a distance, but precisely and completely what those prodigious syllables referred to. And then I remembered a passage I had read in one of D.T. Suzuki's essays. "What is the Dharma-Body of the Buddha?" ('"the Dharma-Body of the Buddha" is another way of saying Mind, Suchness, the Void, the Godhead.) The question is asked in a Zen monastery by an earnest and bewildered novice. And with the prompt irrelevance of one of the Marx Brothers, the Master answers, "The hedge at the bottom of the garden." "And the man who realizes this truth," the novice dubiously inquires, '"what, may I ask, is he?" Groucho gives him a whack over the shoulders with his staff and answers, "A golden-haired lion."

It had been, when I read it, only a vaguely pregnant piece of nonsense. Now it was all as clear as day, as evident as Euclid. Of course the Dharma-Body of the Buddha was the hedge at the bottom of the garden. At the same time, and no less obviously, it was these flowers, it was anything that I - or rather the blessed Not-I, released for a moment from my throttling embrace - cared to look at.

When I see "see" in this type of context, I usually think of experiencing something in all ways, not just visually. I think that's what is being discussed. — T Clark

"[Nietzsche] thought that love of systems was a human weakness and that the stronger one’s character, the less one would need and the less attracted one would be to a system. Nietzsche holds that if God were to exist, he would not, contrary to eighteenth-century views, be a master geometer with a universal system of the world. He would see each thing clearly as precisely that which it is and nothing else, and he would not need to use a concept to catch it and reduce it to something else he already knows. Humans are not gods, of course, and so they cannot attain this state, but that is a failing, not an advantage that they have, nor is it anything to be especially proud of or pleased with oneself for having produced." (Geuss, Changing the Subject)

While I am no theist, I find something very beautiful about the idea of 'seeing each thing clearly as precisely that which it is', and I think it's entirely fair to say that there's a kind of divinity involved in any attempt to do just that. — StreetlightX

Specialization does not extrapolate reliably to the large picture. You need to be more of a generalists who is able to zoom out and take it a wider range of clarity, at the same time. From the big picture, the specialty details, can take on new meaning. — wellwisher

So the OP is balderdash in striving for some superiority of "direct perception" over "systematising conception". That is not how things work either psychologically or metaphysically.

The general and the particular are both forms of conception used to framed our acts of perception. We don't just zero in on differences, but differences we believe make a difference. So a lack of sameness, the existence of individuation, is a judgement that depends on a prevailing generalisation about what should mostly be the case, and hence what now stands out as a significant difference, not a difference we would merely ignore. — apokrisis

You don't think that it is interesting that we use the word "see" in such a context considering that we are visual creatures that receive most of the information about the world via light and therefore tend to think that the world is the way that it appears to our eyes? — Harry Hindu

What are ALL the ways that something can be experienced? — Harry Hindu

The omniscience nature of the concept of God, allows him to zoom in or zoom out to view clarity from any distance. There is no need to extrapolate with concepts. Science and human knowledge, by being specialized, can't see very far beyond its own area of specialty. However, each zone of specialty attempts to extrapolate beyond itself, where it has no clear vision. — wellwisher

Yes, seeing 'that which is', exactly as it is, is Objectivity, I think. It is something only God can or could do. — Pattern-chaser