Usually, we just see what we see. As we go about our daily lives (And what else is there?), we typically don’t see ourselves seeing what we see. In the same way, we feel what we feel. Period. That’s it. We feel it usually without feeling ourselves feeling it. Likewise, we think what we think with the words and images we have; and as we do so we don’t think about ourselves thinking. (Unless, heaven forbid, you happen to be a philosopher, linguist, or maybe an anthropologist).
We are, however, reaching a critical time in human history, and world history. It’s a time when more and more of us need to see ourselves more clearly, more reflexively. We need to see ourselves more objectively. We really need to think more about what we think. At the same time, we’re developing the knowledge and understanding to do just that—knowledge that helps bring ourselves into better focus to ourselves.
The relatively new theory of ourselves as cultural beings is a key part of that knowledge. Today’s theory of culture is based empirically in close observation of the diversity of peoples and cultures around our ever-shrinking world. It makes sense of, even explains, that diversity—and much else as well, about being human. As the current widely accepted theory of human nature, it has become grounded in and part of new understandings of the roles of evolution, emergence, and complexity in the organization of the world.
The ancient Greeks, way back at the beginnings of Western civilization, had a famous motto whose enduring relevance has carried it through the ages: “KNOW THYSELF.” Today’s theory of human culture adds a whole new and rich dimension to how we know ourselves.
Memento Mori mosaic from excavations in the convent of San Gregorio, Via Appia, Rome, Italy. Now in the National Museum, Rome, Italy. The Greek motto gnōthi sauton (know thyself, nosce te ipsum) combines with the image to convey the famous warning: Respice post te; hominem te esse memento; memento mori. (Look behind; remember that you are mortal; remember death.)
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Let me offer another way to think about what I just said. Look around. You’re seeing through the lenses of your eyes. But you just see what you see; you don’t see the lens of your eye that you’re seeing through.
Culture is like that: human culture is the lens of the soul. It’s the lens that we see/experience our world through. It shapes our experience of the world, usually without our being aware of it. We just see what we see.
Our empirical knowledge and theories of anatomy, of the behavior of light, and so on, brings the lens of our eye and how it works into focus even as we see through it. Similarly our current and quite recent empirical 
knowledge and theory of culture helps bring our culture into focus as we live it. We begin to “see” our own culture—we understand that we “see” the world through our own particular “cultural lens,” even as we do so.
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But the story of seeing gets even more complex. Seeing is not only something that the eye does; it’s something that the brain does—or rather, that involves a whole neural system including the brain. The neural system makes sense of the variations in light and dark, colours and shadings, that the eye registers. It is programmed to “see” them in terms of patterns and wholes—that is, in terms of what psychologists call gestalts or gestalten. Without this initial patterning we would experience not the sensible, ordered world we know, but rather, as the psychologist William James famously put it, we would experience simply “one great blooming, buzzing confusion.”
Familiar optical illusi
ons offer one of the best ways to illustrate the gestalt effect. This picture that you can see alternatively as a vase, or two faces in profile looking at each other, is one familiar instance.
Because such images are perceived as alternative wholes, as gestalts, it is very difficult if not impossible to see both images at once. Notice also how key elements of the picture remain constant as elements, but nevertheless change what they are—they change what they mean or represent—in the different contexts of the alternate perceptual gestalts. The “noses” of the two faces, for example, become the “waist” of the vase. Gestalt shifts illustrate how the “things” that make up the parts of wholes are often less “thing-like” (less context-independent) than we usually take them to be.
Because of this inborn tendency to see in terms of wholes, and to see the parts of the wholes in relation to the wholes they are in, what we call “things” actually are often quite context-dependent. Even common everyday objects are what they are only because they, and we, exist together in a particular cultural context. So long as we remain wholly within that context, however, seeing the world through our own cultural lens, it’s hard not to take it for granted and assume that we’re simply seeing the world as it really is.
All this holds true especially in the realms of cultural perception of ourselves and our world. Culturally-shaped views of human nature in nature, while much more complex than simple visual images, have similarly gestalt-like and holistic aspects.
We normally take the particular “view” we are “in” to represent the world as it “really is.” That view of things can be very tenacious. But once it does shift, everything changes, even as all the elements that make up our particular view of reality remain the same. If we’re focused on the elements, the gestalt-shifts in their overall context can occur subtly, even unnoticed. (by all accounts, this happened for many people with the rise of Hitler in Germany: all the elements of everyday life remained comfortingly familiar, even as, frighteningly unnoticed, their cultural context changed radically.)
In the realms of culture, as of scientific theory, we speak of “paradigm shift” rather than of “gestalt shift.” But they are much the same kind of thing. Gestalt shifts of visual images, though, are relatively easy to experience, and well illustrate the phenomenon and how it works.
Here is another famous image that can be a little more challenging. You 
can see either the face of an old woman, or of a young one in profile. This is one of my favorites. For me, this image even better illustrates how the gestalt effect compels one to see either one image or the other; and also how, before you learn to make the shift easily, whatever image you see is compelling—is difficult not to see.
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We find ourselves now in the midst of a large cultural paradigm shift, with our view of ourselves—of our human nature in nature—as its fulcrum. Recent (meaning the last five hundred or so years) Western history holds other examples of paradigm shifts; but you have to go back a ways to find examples of comparable importance.
Perhaps the most notable such paradigm shift is that which often is taken to mark the birth of the modern age and of modern science. The discovery, contrary to everyday experience and to deep-rooted religious doctrine of the time, that the Earth is not the literal center of all of God’s Creation changed the course of Western history, and of world history, for that matter. The “Darwinian Revolution” is another one (but we’ll save that ’til later).
When you watch the sun rise and set, or chart the regular revolutions of the stars through the heavens, you “see” these “heavenly bodies” revolving around the Earth. Before Copernicus and Galileo proved otherwise, most people took what their eyes saw, this naïve view, literally. They built cosmologies and religious beliefs around what they clearly saw. The discovery, however counterintuitive, that the Earth and other planets revolve around the sun in the vastness of space launched a major paradigm shift in our view of the heavens and the Earth, and indeed of ourselves. Now we take it for granted; but it and related discoveries hugely changed the course of Western history and shaped who each one of us, the cultural heirs of that legacy, is today.
Today’s discovery of culture involves a comparable paradigm shift. The discovery of culture, however, focuses directly on us and our relationships with each other and with the Earth, rather than on the sun and planets and stars and the relationships between them.
Because it is even more intimately about us, and because we’re in the midst of it and don’t have the distance of time to provide perspective, and because we now have more sophisticated and complicated concepts and understandings to work with, our current change-of-mind can be quite challenging to understand and to see. It will be our task to learn how to better navigate the paradigm shift we are in—to track back and forth between the contrasting visions of who we are—much as we do with the alternative views of the above visual images. Today’s paradigm shift, in which cultural theory plays a central role, offers new views of ourselves that hold both unprecedented challenges and opportunities in the Human journey.