Why do we want to experience the world through someone else's eyes?

We want to experience the world through someone else's eyes because our own seeing is finite, and art is the only reliable method of borrowing another way of perceiving. The desire is not escapism; it is a hunger for additional reality.

The limits of one pair of eyes

Each of us perceives through a single, partial apparatus. We miss most of what is there. Another artist's work is a report from a different apparatus — a way of seeing we could not have arrived at alone — and encountering it widens what we can perceive.

Art as borrowed perception

This is one of art's deepest functions: not to entertain but to lend us a way of attending. When a song or an essay makes the world look different afterward, what has happened is that we have temporarily inherited someone else's attention. We return enlarged.

In essence

We want to see through others' eyes because our own perception is finite, and art is the method of borrowing additional ways of attending. The desire is a hunger for more reality, not an escape from our own.

Related questions

Is this the same as empathy? Related. Empathy borrows feeling; this borrows perception. Art often does both.

Why is this valuable? Because a life perceived through only one set of eyes is narrower than it needs to be, and art is how we add sets.