Reality provides us with many evidences that lead us to believe that man no longer enjoys anything as much as he enjoys watching pictures, and this belief leads us to think about whether a person’s addiction to the pleasure of sight robs one’s insight and destroys the mind.

And if a person, as we describe, is deprived of reason and insight, then it is worthwhile for us to ask about the side or parties that benefit from keeping him in this state.

Perhaps this calls us to broaden our perceptions to think about the nature of the relationship between image culture as an integral part of modern culture, and tyranny.

In his valuable book on image and globalization (Bilder auf Weltreise: Eine Globalisierungskritik), the German scholar Wolfgang Ullrich states the conviction that "powerful people fear not images as much as they fear books and speeches."

This leads us to contemplate the relationship between the image and the word and the history of the conflict between them, leading to the era of globalization.

The image, according to his opinion, can prove something and cannot negate it, unlike the word that can prove and deny at the same time.

However, you cannot deny the existence of a thing based on the image, like someone who wants to deny the existence of God because he does not see him.

The word can carry more meanings and news than the image can, because it has the power to refer to the absent, the unspecified.

Perhaps this lies its strength and danger, in contrast to the image.

Wolfgang Ulrich's book opens before the reader a vast field of knowledge, in which talking about the image overlaps with talking about the word, tyranny, politics, religion, morals, logic, and other things.

However, what stops us in the book, in addition to the contrast between the image and the word, is the writer's attempt to prove the relationship between the expansion of capitalist thought since the sixteenth century and the use of images.

We understand from his speech that this relationship between the tendency towards world domination and pleading with the arts of the image reached the end in the culture of the image as it was evident in the era of globalization.

When contemplating, it becomes clear to us that the matter of the relationship between the image and the word is like the relationship between the domineering physical tendency and the liberating spiritual tendency.

The image limits the horizons of perception to refer to a specific world;

The owner of the picture does not show us anything but what he sees.

Contrary to the word that alerts to invisible worlds to liberate the mind from the power of the visible world, the image invites us to represent a closed world, unlike the word that has the ability to refer us to contemplation of the Absolute.

And any evidence for this is clearer than the story of Pharaoh with Moses, peace be upon him.

Man no longer enjoys anything as much as he enjoys watching the sound (Shutterstock)

Moses, peace be upon him, came to call Pharaoh to believe in the unseen, with things that are not visible. However, Pharaoh saw in this call something that might undermine the pillars of his visible, existing authority, so he hastened to address his people, saying: “Is it not mine that the kingdom of Egypt and these rivers flow beneath me? (Al-Zukhruf / from verse 51), and he did not say: Will you not hear?

It was Moses, peace be upon him, who called people to hear, to listen to words that warn of the existence of other dimensions and other worlds.

As for him, he wanted to consolidate the foundations of his dominant power by referring people to the manifestations of his determined power.

It is indisputable that the image is, as it is said in the language of the times, a device of the state, the regime, or the ideological authority that it employs to draw the political horizon and shape the world order as it sees it.

The image is more capable of transcending cultural boundaries and transcending what is attached to words in their various fields of circulation from countless multiple connotations.

However, the association of the image with the "closed" weakens it in front of the word as an expression of the "absolute".

With this consideration, it is possible to predict the collapse of the authority based on the pictorial physicality in front of the call of speaking spirituality.

While I was reading Arthur Herman's book, which is a double biography of both Gandhi and Churchill and the epic rivalry between them (Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry that Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age), I found something that I think is more indicative of what is going on around it. Our discussion here is about the relationship between the image and tyranny, and between the image and the word.

At the end of the book, Hermann comes with the words of one of the ambassadors, in which he says, addressing Churchill: "You will not be able to defeat Gandhi, because he calls for the absolute."

We conclude from this statement that there are those who call for the "absolute", such as Gandhi, and others who call for the "closed", such as Churchill, and that the balance of the first is outweighed at the expense of the second in the end.

All the images that the British Empire mustered to keep India subservient to its authority were eroded by the words of the preacher Gandhi in the end.

A person who overuses one sense and neglects the other senses is a truncated being, not a complete human being who keeps all his senses alert.

The image in modern Western culture: from the cradle...on the way to the grave

The Windsor Palace Museum of the British Royal Family keeps a picture of a heart drawn by Leonardo da Vinci, the European Renaissance artist par excellence.

What is remarkable is what was written in the artist’s handwriting under the drawing stating that, from now on, the seeker of truth must beg for the picture, but the word should be left to the blind.

This speech reflects a growing awareness of the ability of the image and its arts to dissect reality into its small parts in search of the facts of secondary things in it, so that the science of renaissance was not associated with anything as much as it was associated with anatomy.

In this context, I remember how the poet and thinker Kent Wyeth, during his lectures that he gave us at the Sorbonne, whenever he mentioned the word (science) stressed the first part of the word "sci-" while making a hand movement as if he was holding a saw, i.e. "La scie".

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche describes in "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" deformed human creatures, including those whose ear dangled until he disappeared behind it, and some of whose eyes bulged out until they covered his entire face, and in this description he criticizes the European renaissance that produced for us deformed geniuses who were called excessive and negligent, excessive in Using one sense and neglecting the other senses.

This description applies to Leonardo da Vinci as a symbol of a culture that marginalized the other senses in favor of the sense of sight in search of truth.

It is indisputable that the world today, under the dominant Western culture, is witnessing the dominance of the image culture.

It has become commonplace for us to see people walking, riding bicycles, driving cars, or children playing with their eyes fixed on the screen of their mobile phones, as if they were searching for a lost truth, while in fact they do not feel, in the sense that their sensory functions are disabled for the benefit of the sense of sight.

The arena of literary thought and creativity in Europe and the West in general is not devoid of writings in which its authors dared to criticize the culture of the image in a way that would affect the intellectual roots on which it was founded.

Whoever reads the book "The Little Prince" by Antoine Saint-Exupéry is stopped by the words of the fox as he advises the little prince: "This is my secret for you. It is a very simple secret. One does not see well except with the heart. As for the eye, it is unable to reach the essence of things."

I see in the fox's words to the Little Prince a criticism of an intellectual system that has existed for at least two thousand years, a system that uses the sense of sight to reach the essence of things.

A summary is a must

The reader may get the impression that the intention behind this article is to say that there is a differentiation between the senses, especially between the sense of sight and the sense of hearing, or between the image and the word, and therefore we warn in this context that our intention is not to endorse the differentiation between the senses, but rather to criticize image culture as a culture The power of sight is so empowered that insight falls short of the correct representation of the vast cosmic reality, the reality of the heavens and the earth, and from looking at the souls.

Our belief is that nothing guarantees balance and stability to man better than the interaction of the senses and the overlapping of the arts of image and word, the image as a means of building human perception, and the word as a means of opening this perception to invisible dimensions that expand our sense of true existence.