Out of the Known and the Seen
“Where the tree of knowledge stands, there is always Paradise: so say the oldest and the youngest serpents.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
Recently, I’ve been reading a chapter on the symbolism of the eye in Jungian psychology from The Self: Quest of Meaning in a Changing World by Renate Daniel, the president of the Jungian Institute. In this text, she returns to one of the oldest symbols in Jungian psychology: the eye — the symbol of the Self, which sees everything.
In many traditions, the image of the “eye of God” appears. Nothing remains hidden before it: neither good nor guilt, nor human error. Today, this image seems to have shifted its place. The all-seeing eye appears less often in religion and more often in technology — in surveillance systems, in data, in algorithms that are moving towards knowing about the humans more than we are willing to admit.
Being seen carries a certain tension between the desire to be known and the instinct to remain ungraspable. Visibility invites simplification, naming, and definition. We need the gaze of another person. We want to be noticed and recognised. And yet, a gaze can also overwhelm us — as if someone were looking into a place we want to protect.
In this context, Renate refers to the Brothers Grimm fairy tale The Sea Hare.
Its heroine is a king’s daughter who, from the twelve windows of her castle, can see everything that happens in the kingdom. Nothing can be hidden from her. Her gaze is absolute. Thanks to it, she maintains power and complete independence. But the price is high.
No man can hide from her, so every man who tries to marry her is found and killed. Omniscience protects her from relationships. The tale reveals something deeply contemporary: where control is absolute, there is no room for encounter.
Only the youngest of the brothers finds a way to hide from her gaze — not through strength or cleverness, but with the help of animals: a raven, a fish, and a fox.
The raven (first attempt — hidden in an egg)
He fetched an egg out of his nest, cut it into two parts, and shut the youth inside it, then made it whole again, and seated himself on it. When the king’s daughter went to the first window she could not discover him, nor could she from the others, and she began to be uneasy, but from the eleventh she saw him. She ordered the raven to be shot, and the egg to be brought and broken, and the youth was forced to come out. She said, for once you are excused, but if you do not better than this, you are lost.
This is one of the most striking images: concealment as return to origin, almost like being placed back into potential rather than visibility.
The fish (second attempt — hidden in the depths)
Next day he went to the lake, called the fish to him and said, I suffered you to live, now tell me where to hide myself so that the king’s daughter may not see me. The fish thought for a while, and at last cried, I have it, I will shut you up in my stomach. He swallowed him, and went down to the bottom of the lake. The king’s daughter looked through her windows, and even from the eleventh did not see him, and was alarmed, but at length from the twelfth she saw him. She ordered the fish to be caught and killed, and then the youth appeared. It is easy to imagine the state of mind he was in. She said, twice you are forgiven, but be sure that your head will be set on the hundredth post.
Here, hiding becomes descent — not just invisibility, but withdrawal into something deeper than sight itself.
The fox (final attempt — transformation)
On the last day, he went with a heavy heart into the country, and met the fox. You know how to find all kinds of hiding-places, said he, I let you live, now advise me where I shall hide myself so that the king’s daughter shall not discover me. That’s a hard task, answered the fox, looking very thoughtful. At length he cried, I have it, and went with him to a spring, dipped himself in it, and came out as a stall-keeper in the market, and dealer in animals. The youth had to dip himself in the water also, and was changed into a small sea-hare. The merchant went into the town, and showed the pretty little animal, and many persons gathered together to see it. At length the king’s daughter came likewise, and as she liked it very much, she bought it, and gave the merchant a good deal of money for it. Before he gave it over to her, he said to it, when the king’s daughter goes to the window, creep quickly under the braids of her hair. And now the time arrived when she was to search for him. She went to one window after another in turn, from the first to the eleventh, and did not see him. When she did not see him from the twelfth either, she was full of anxiety and anger, and shut it down with such violence that the glass in every window shivered into a thousand pieces, and the whole castle shook. She went back and felt the sea-hare beneath the braids of her hair. Then she seized it, and threw it on the ground exclaiming, away with you, get out of my sight. It ran to the merchant, and both of them hurried to the spring, wherein they plunged, and received back their true forms. The youth thanked the fox, and said, the raven and the fish are idiots compared with you, you know the right tune to play, there is no denying that.
The princess, who sees everything, cannot love — not because love is absent, but because nothing is allowed to remain hidden. When, at last, she cannot find him — even from the final window — her world collapses. For the first time, she encounters the limits of her own vision.
The youth went straight to the palace. The princess was already expecting him, and abandoned herself to her fate. The wedding was solemnized, and now he was king, and lord of all the kingdom. He never told her where he had concealed himself for the third time, and who had helped him, so she believed that he had done everything by his own skill, and she had a great respect for him, for she thought to herself, he is able to do more than I.
Our desire to know and to see more and more
Renate sees something profoundly modern in this fairy tale: our desire to know and to see more and more. And yet, the princess who sees everything remains alone. Her gaze, sharpened into control, leaves no room for uncertainty, no space where another person might exist beyond her knowledge. To see everything is, in a way, to defend oneself against the risk of not knowing — and therefore against the vulnerability that love requires. The all-seeing eye becomes an interior wall. “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” wrote Rumi. And so the limit she encounters is not only the limit of vision, but the beginning of something more difficult: the slow recognition that love does not emerge from perfect clarity, but from what we allow to remain unseen, unmastered, and open. As Rilke writes in his Letters to a Young Poet (Letter IV):
“Love consists in this: that two solitudes protect, border, and salute each other.”
What remains unseen is not an obstacle to love, but its very condition.
This is similar to Emmanuel Levinas’s ideas in Totality and Infinity — his foundational philosophical text arguing that the Other always exceeds our comprehension and cannot be fully known or reduced to our categories.
“The face speaks. It is not what it says that is first. The face itself is a command, a saying of Thou which calls me to responsibility… ” (Levinas, Totality and Infinity, tr. Alphonso Lingis, 1969)
What Levinas suggests here is subtle but radical: before we interpret the other person — before we assign them meaning, identity, or narrative — they already confront us with an ethical demand. The face is not an object to be understood but a presence that interrupts our tendency to grasp, define, and contain. It resists being turned into knowledge. In this sense, the face is not something we “see” in the ordinary way at all. It is precisely what undoes the safety of seeing.
To truly encounter another, then, is not to know them fully, but to recognise that we cannot. Their interiority remains irreducible, their life always beyond the reach of our categories. And yet, rather than distance us, this impossibility creates responsibility. We are called not to mastery, but to care, to remain open. This deepens the tension of being seen. If the other cannot be fully known, then being seen is never complete — it is always partial, always inadequate, which makes an ethical relation possible at all. For if we could fully comprehend the other, we might also feel entitled to contain them. Instead, Levinas leaves us in a state of necessary humility: we stand before one another not as finished truths, but as infinities we are responsible for, yet can never fully grasp.
