Reading to my son, or just watching him handle his toys, I keep noticing that he has never seen most of the things these objects are about. He’s never seen a lion, but there’s one on the page right next to a baby. He’s never seen a rabbit, and rabbits keep showing up anyway, in drawings and as plushies. So he meets the representation long before the referent.

Representations are made by people who impose their own way of seeing into them, maybe without meaning to and mostly without noticing. Somebody decided how round a rabbit’s head is. Somebody decided that a lion is yellow and friendly and roughly the size of a dog. Those decisions dress up everything my boy is “absorbing”, and when he eventually meets a rabbit out in the wild, he’ll read it through the rabbits he already has.

He also plays with spheres. But perfect spheres do not exist in real life. The sphere came the other way round. People looked at mostly round objects, abstracted a shape that neither of them quite has, and thus geometry happened. My son will get the geometry first… as most of us did. Then he’ll hold an orange and probably notice that it falls short.

Some (aligning with Plato) would say the shortfall is a real thing, and that the orange is a deficient copy of a Form that was there before either of us. I, of course, don’t buy it.

Just how much of what I take things to look like did I get from a drawing? Or, in other words, how much of my understanding did I get from ready-made categories handed down to me, without ever checking where they came from? I don’t know. Whatever I’d check with, I most likely got the same way. But that’s life too. We need these crutches to get through it, I guess.