The visual system is one of the more important modalities within NLP.
Man is a creature that makes shapes and rhythms; he is practised at nothing better and it seems that he takes pleasure in nothing more than in inventing figures. Only observe how our eye occupies itself as soon as it receives nothing more to see: it creates itself something to see. Presumably in the same situation our hearing does just that, too: it practices. Without the transformation of the world into figures and rhythms there would be nothing ‘the same’ for us, thus nothing recurrent, and thus no possibility of experiencing and appropriating, of feeding. In all perception, i.e., in the most original appropriation, what is essentially happening is an action, or more precisely: an imposition of shapes upon things – only the superficial talk of,impressions’. In this way man comes to know his force as a resisting and even more as a determining force – rejecting, selecting, shaping to fit, slotting into his schemata. There is something active about our taking on a stimulus in the first place and taking it on as that particular stimulus. It is in the nature of this activity not only to posit shapes, rhythms and successions of shapes, but also to appraise the formation it has created with an eye to incorporation or rejection. Thus arises our world, our
whole world: and no supposed ‘true reality’, no ‘in-themselves of things’ corresponds to this whole world which we have created, belonging to us alone. Rather it is itself our only reality, and ‘knowledge’ thus considered proves to be only a means of feeding. But we are beings who are difficult to feed and have everywhere enemies and, as it were, indigestibles – that is what has made human knowledge refined, and ultimately so proud of its refinement that it doesn’t want to hear that it is not a goal but a means, or even a tool of the stomach – if not itself a kind of stomach! – –
Notebook 38, June – July 1885 paragraph 10