Years ago, watching a film of the French Nouvelle Vague, I was struck by an idea I later put into a phrase of my own: we can only obtain the reflection of the reflection of reality. It felt like something Godard or Resnais might have said. Later I understood the idea was much older than either of them. What follows is how it grew on me, and why I now think it describes not only cinema, but every attempt we make to know anything.
The mirror
Start with the simplest case. When I look at myself in a mirror, I do not see myself. I see light that left my body, struck a thin layer of silver or aluminum, bounced back and entered my eyes, where my brain assembled it into an image. The image is virtual: it appears to stand behind the glass, as far behind it as I stand in front, and it is laterally inverted. My right hand is its left. Even this most direct encounter with my own face is a reconstruction, made by a nervous system from reflected light.
Now replace the mirror with the mind. Whatever reaches us from the world has already been filtered by our senses, then interpreted by what we know, remember and expect. We are the mirror, and what we take for reality is the reflection of a reflection.
Plato got there first
The oldest version of this idea I know is in Plato. In the allegory of the cave, in the seventh book of the Republic, prisoners take for reality the shadows that objects cast on a wall. In the tenth book he goes further: the painter imitates the appearance of a bed, and the bed itself is already a copy of the idea of a bed. Art, for Plato, stands three removes from the truth. A reflection of a reflection, two and a half thousand years before the Nouvelle Vague.
Kant gave the idea its modern form. We never know the thing in itself, only things as they appear to us through the structures of our own mind. Nietzsche pushed it to the edge, writing in his notebooks that there are no facts, only interpretations.
And in 1929, the Belgian surrealist René Magritte put the whole problem into a single picture. In The Treachery of Images (La Trahison des images), he painted a pipe, carefully and realistically, and wrote beneath it: Ceci n’est pas une pipe, “This is not a pipe.” He was right. You cannot fill it with tobacco or smoke it. It is paint on canvas, an image of a pipe, and the painting reminds us of what we forget every time we look at a picture, or at the world: what we see is never the thing itself.
Ranke’s dream
Historians had their own version of the problem, and it is where my thinking took a decisive turn. In 1824, in the preface to his first book, Leopold von Ranke wrote that history had been assigned the task of judging the past and instructing the present for the benefit of the future; his work, he said, aspired to no such high office, and wanted only to show what actually happened: wie es eigentlich gewesen.
The phrase became the motto of scientific history, and it is easy to read it as arrogance, as if Ranke believed the historian could see the past as it was. In context, it was the opposite: a modest refusal to judge, a promise to let the sources speak. But the dream behind it, of a window onto the past with no glass in between, did not survive the twentieth century. The historian chooses which evidence matters, describes it in the language of his own time, and sees only the past his present allows him to see.
Curiously, the warning had come before Ranke. In the eighteenth century, Johann Martin Chladenius had already argued that every account of an event depends on the Sehepunkt, the point from which the observer sees it. Two honest witnesses, standing in different places, will tell different stories, and neither is lying.
Resnais and Godard
What Ranke hoped to do for the past, the Nouvelle Vague showed could not be done even for the present.
In Last Year at Marienbad (1961), Alain Resnais, working from a screenplay by Alain Robbe-Grillet, sets a man and a woman in a baroque hotel of endless corridors. He insists they met and were lovers the year before; she denies it, hesitates, and perhaps begins to remember. The film never tells us who is right, because there is nothing outside their memories to check them against. Memory does not retrieve the past; it rebuilds it each time.
In Pierrot le Fou (1965), Jean-Luc Godard sends Ferdinand, whom Marianne insists on calling Pierrot, away from his bourgeois Paris life on a run south with her, in a story that keeps breaking into comic strips, quotations, slogans and characters speaking to the camera. Pierrot and Marianne do not so much live their lives as quote them. Godard had already said that photography is truth, and cinema is truth twenty-four times per second. In Pierrot, that truth is shown for what it is: a sequence of images, each a reflection of earlier images. Years later he put it in a pun that Magritte would have signed: ce n’est pas une image juste, c’est juste une image, “it is not a just image, it is just an image.”
Resnais showed that we cannot know what happened. Godard showed that we cannot even be sure of what is happening now.
You only know what you know
But the plane still lands
None of this means the world is an illusion. I can look at a ship, a plane or a car, board it and travel, and no one in his right mind would claim it was not a ship, a plane or a car, or that the trip did not happen. When Bishop Berkeley argued that matter exists only in being perceived, Samuel Johnson kicked a large stone and said, “I refute it thus.” He had a point. Practical knowledge works because reality pushes back: a badly designed plane does not fly, and anyone can check whether it landed. That knowledge is public, tested by consequences, and good enough to live by. The reflection of the reflection concerns something else. The engineer, the passenger, the child and the collector all ride in the same car and would all call it a car, yet each sees a different thing in it. And ask them a week later what the trip was like, what it meant, what really happened along the way, and you will get four different stories. We know how to use the world with remarkable precision. What we never fully know is what it is, beyond what we need it to be.
Where does that leave us? With something I came to see, after many years, as simply the human condition. We never know what is in front of us. We know only what we already know, applied to what is in front of us. I do not see this tree; I see “a tree,” a category I learned long ago. I do not meet a stranger; I meet a person I immediately fit into patterns I already have.
And what we know keeps changing. Each new experience revises the old ones, each memory is rewritten when it is recalled, and yesterday’s certainty becomes today’s simplification. Every attempt to escape this circle is made with the same tools that built the circle. We can widen it, enrich it, become aware of it, but never step outside it.
That is not a reason for despair. It is the reason Socrates is still worth reading. His famous wisdom, usually summed up as “I know that I know nothing,” was, in Plato’s account, more precise: he did not think he knew what he did not know. That is all the circle allows, and it is enough. To know that we see only reflections is already to see them more clearly.
The French, then, did not discover the idea. They filmed it.
Note to the reader: this is a revised version of a post first published in November 2025. The original was built as a dialogue with ChatGPT, then in its early days, and reproduced its answers at length. Some of them contained errors and quotations that could not be verified, including the attribution of the title phrase to Godard. This version corrects them and is written in my own words.
