A new book takes another look at the age old question of blindness:  is
someone blind or visually impaired?  The book is reviewed by Arther C.
Danto in the New Republic.

kelly


The New Republic, April 19, 1999 pNA(1)
Blindness and Insight. (Review) Arthur C. Danto.

Sight Unseen By Georgina Kleege (Yale University Press, 233 pp., $25)

The subtitle of Diderot's Letter on the Blind is A l'usage de ceux qui
voient, or For the Use of Those Who See. The same subtitle might serve for
Georgina Kleege's strong and interesting book, intended as it is to modify
the way that the sighted view the sightless or the near- sightless, which
is her own condition. Kleege is legally blind. And so her aim is to urge
the sighted to "revise their image of blindness." The blind are urged not
to fake seeing in order to "pass"--as if blindness were a stigma rather
than an impairment.

The structure of Kleege's argument is exceedingly contemporary: it belongs
with the larger literature of texts written by the discriminated-against
for the use of those who discriminate. ("For the Use of Males," "For the
Use of Whites.") Through a linked sequence of autobiographical vignettes,
Kleege seeks to demonstrate that she is in no deep sense different or
"other" than her normally-sighted readers. Within the parameters of macular
degeneration, diagnosed when she was eleven, she has found ways to lead an
agreeably cosmopolitan life as a writer, a reader, and a teacher. She
visits art exhibitions and she watches movies. She travels. The differences
have mainly to do with "practical solutions to mundane problems," which
differ only in degree from employing a magnifying lens to read fine print,
or bifocals, or stronger light, or larger print. (Kleege's life also
requires an admirable degree of pluck, I imagine.)

But Kleege begins and ends her book by identifying herself as blind.
"Writing this book made me blind" is her wry opening sentence. This is
literally false, but perhaps it is morally true. Her eyesight, such as it
is, was no worse than it had been when she began her book, and only
slightly worse than when her condition was first diagnosed. In the course
of writing the book, however, she "understood for the first time how little
I actually see." This discovery underscores how remarkably much she had
made of that little, but it does not entirely erase the difference between
her and the fully blind. She declares herself blind tout court, now
preferring that to papering over her deficit with "less precise phrases,
such as `visually impaired' or `partially sighted.'" In fact, those are far
more precise characterizations of her condition than "blind" is.

With important qualifications, Kleege pronounces herself blind somewhat in
the way in which Kennedy pronounced himself a Berliner. It is a matter of
moral sympathy. What she really makes us understand is how even a minuscule
amount of vision is a lot. "I know how to make the most of what I see," she
writes--but the blind have no vision to make the most of. Against the way
the blind are represented in novels, plays, and films, she sets her own
fulfilling life. And she identifies herself with the blind in order, on the
same data, to dispel the myths of their otherness, and to insist that,
except for the way the sighted represent them, the problems of the blind
are, like her problems, "practical and mundane."

I accept that there are disfiguring myths concerning the blind, and I can
understand how the blind would feign sightedness to avoid being
stigmatized. I grant Kleege's argument. For philosophical reasons, though,
I am uncertain that a small amount of vision is the same as no vision at
all. The fully blind, as Diderot sympathetically described them, learned to
do many remarkable things, from threading needles to writing treatises on
optics. But Diderot supposed that there are deep philosophical differences
between them and the sighted, which from his perspective would include, I
think, the poorly sighted, and even the very poorly sighted. The sightless
and the sighted, to put it grandly, live in different conceptual worlds,
beginning with the different way in which the blind represent their own
condition. This deserves some discussion.

The blind make their modern philosophical debut in John Locke's Essay
Concerning Human Understanding, through what has become known as the
Molyneaux Question. Would a blind person, able to distinguish a cube from a
globe by touch, distinguish them by sight alone if given sight (say, by the
removal of a cataract)? Molyneaux claimed not, and he counted this a
confirmation of Locke's thesis that visual concepts are acquired only
through visual sensations. Many important philosophers-- Leibniz, Berkeley,
Condillac--debated the Molyneaux Question, which at least raised the
question of whether the sighted and the blind have the same concepts of
basic geometrical solids.

But the point is more general. Having no concept of how the world looks,
what do the blind know of what it means to find one's way with one's eyes?
And Locke's theory of ideas raised an even more nagging question. Since the
entire edifice of our ideas rests on a foundation of sense experience,
might there not be a difference between the higher ideas of the sighted and
the blind, if pieces of the foundation are inaccessible to the latter?
Diderot took this conjecture to a dangerous extreme in describing the last
words of Saunderson, the celebrated blind mathematician who taught
mathematics at Cambridge. Saunderson cried out, "Oh God of Newton and
Clarke, have pity on me!" Diderot insinuated that Saunderson, as a
consequence of his blindness, may have had a different concept of God, and
therefore a quite different set of metaphysical and moral beliefs, from
those possessed by the sighted.

Perhaps it was to ground this relativism in exact observation that Diderot
conceived his Lettre sur les aveugles, which landed him in prison for a
month, despite its clandestine publication. Relativism suited an
eighteenth-century philosophe with an atheistic bent, and a faith in the
possibility of moral systems more enlightened than those under which people
everywhere lived. But is relativism seriously supported by the different
ways of being in the world that Diderot notes between the sighted and the
blind? Saunderson's blindness did not prevent his treatise on optics from
being understood by the learned community.

I once had a brilliant graduate student who was blind from birth. He had an
understandable interest in philosophical questions about the blind. We had
many candid conversations, and he produced a dissertation on the topic,
under my supervision. As an admirer of Lettre sur les aveugles, I was on
the lookout for anything that might count for or against its momentous
claim. In fact, the only point at which my student and I lived in different
metaphysical worlds had to do with the way we understood the idea of vision
itself. He once told me that, after teaching a class, the students had
become bold enough to question him about what it was like to be blind. They
wanted to know how it was with his eyes: did he see black, for example? He
replied that he did not know, never having experienced black. That would
have been Locke's answer. But then he said something as dazzlingly
transformative as a Zen illumination. He asked them to think of the palm of
their hands, and then asked how it was there: was it always black, or what?

In this way, I think, he taught his students what it was to be blind. One
is blind when the eyes receive only the sorts of sensations received by the
surfaces of the rest of one's body. He himself believed that seeing was a
matter of being touched on the surface of the eyes, which in his case (so
he concluded) must be numb. And these were precisely the views of "the
blind man of Pusieux," whom Diderot knew personally. "What in your opinion,
is the eye?" he was asked. And he answered: "An organ which is affected by
the air in the same way that my hand is affected by a stick." What would it
even be like to have sight for someone who has never had it?

To the degree that one can extrapolate from these observations, I would
have inferred from Kleege's language that she is not strictly blind, since
she more than once borrows language from the texts that she finds
dis-enabling, using words such as "darkness" to describe the condition of
being blind. Is the condition of an anaesthetized limb one of darkness?
Unlike my student, and unlike Diderot's subjects, Kleege had eleven lucky
years of visual life. And so, like neither of them, she is able
phenomenologically to describe the way she sees.

In Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians, she comes upon a passage through
which she learns what it is like to be blind in the way that she is. "There
is a blur," a character says. "But I can see out of the sides of my
eyes.... How could I find my way if I could not see?" Kleege writes: "When
I first read this passage it was with a shock of recognition unlike any I
had known before. The girl's blindness is exactly like mine. The simple
analogy to a blur on a window both gave me a way to describe my blindness
and helped me to see my blindness more precisely." Only someone with some
repository of visual understanding knows that a window is something through
which we see. The sighted see blindness as a window through which only
darkness is seen.

Interestingly, Kleege's visual understanding does not enable her to grasp
what is meant by "eye contact"--seeing that someone sees me seeing them.
Eye contact became a philosophical topic in the writings of Sartre. In his
account, discovering that one is being looked at discloses to the subject
that she is an object for others, and so possesses a far more complex
ontology than traditional speculation on the self allowed. If Sartre is
right, might it not follow that ignorance of eye contact entails a
difference in one's conception of subject and object alike? Kleege says
that she understands the significance of eye contact, but she does not know
what it is. "Why call it contact if no actual contact takes place?"

Here she falls back on the model of touch, much like Diderot's blind
informants. Yet consider the difference between seeing an eye--say, the eye
of an animal--and seeing the animal seeing me with its eye. How would one
translate the difference into differences of touch? My blind student had
similar difficulties in understanding such expressions as "his eyes
glowed." He genuinely believed that the person of whom that is true has
incandescent eyeballs. It is entirely plausible, therefore, that Diderot
might not be altogether wrong about the different metaphysics of the blind.

These are not the kinds of difference that Kleege is concerned to
deconstruct. She is interested rather in myths "equating blindness with
ignorant despair, and sight with virtuous wisdom"--a kind of ocular
paternalism, exemplified over and over again in the blind heroines of the
cinema, whose inability to see others seeing them may be a metaphor for the
objectification of women by gazing men everywhere. "Fear of blindness leads
naturally to fear of the blind." This uncomfortably parallels the
psychoanalytical thesis that fear of castration leads naturally to fear of
women, whose defining lack is perceived by mythologizing males as a
punishment. Small wonder that the blind might pretend to be normal, finding
circuitous ways to appear like everyone else.

It came as a revelation to Kleege that she herself had denied her condition
by refusing to learn Braille, as if by accepting it she would be blind by
default. In a way, she accepts that consequence: she masters Braille and
declares herself blind. If using Braille means that she is blind, then she
is blind, and the sighted world be damned. Braille brings advantages that
were unavailable to her when she pretended that she was like everyone else.
It allows her to read in a comfortable position, or to deliver a lecture
without pressing her notes against her eyes. Still, reading with her
fingers, she pauses over such commonplace expressions as "their eyes met,"
so different in logic from "their lips met"--and so we are back in
Molyneaux territory, and the great debates concerning human understanding.

Since the myths surrounding blindness distort the way in which the blind
think of themselves, Kleege speaks with the voice of a reformer, even a
crusader. She is a feisty writer, and she seems to scan the remarks of
others for the slightest trace of what we might call sightism. She
sometimes imagines discussions that she would have with unwitting
sightists, and they resemble the discussions that I remember having had
with a feminist theorist with whom I was once involved, which made me
conscious of even the most infinitesimal degree of sexism. Kleege's point,
in these imagined disputations, is always that seeing takes place in the
brain. "My brain is still sighted," she writes. Seeing is not merely
letting the world flow in through the eyes. The eyes do not read word by
word down a page; they execute saccades--random leaps across the
page--through which an image of what is written forms in the brain. Kleege
herself, in a more cumbersome way, duplicates saccadic vision by turning
her head this way and that, until some sort of picture forms in her mind
(or brain, if you wish). The sighted and the blind alike perceive by
forming hypotheses.

But are the hypotheses of the blind entirely congruent with those of the
sighted? Or do they differ through the fact that they lack the sense
required? Turning the head this way or that would not help at all if there
were not enough vision in place to help the brain form concepts. Just
because perception always involves the brain does not mean that the brain
of the blind and the brain of the sighted are alike when it comes to
forming concepts of the world before them. Philosophically, Kleege's terms
fail to satisfy.

What is most powerful about Kleege's book is the picture that it creates of
a gifted woman leading a full life despite a handicap that might be
supposed to have made it almost impossible. Ironically, by taking on the
identity of the truly blind, especially by acquiring Braille, the
differences between her and the sighted are narrowed. This is a provocative
book, gracefully written and morally urgent. It demonstrates how narrow the
path is between the denial of difference and the transformation of
difference into otherness. In the end, what Kleege wants to say is that she
is different without being other. Philosophical considerations apart, she
is right.

Arthur C. Danto is the author, most recently, of Philosophizing Art
(University of California Press).


VICUG-L is the Visually Impaired Computer User Group List.
To join or leave the list, send a message to
[log in to unmask]  In the body of the message, simply type
"subscribe vicug-l" or "unsubscribe vicug-l" without the quotations.
 VICUG-L is archived on the World Wide Web at
http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/vicug-l.html